How to do multiple backups using CPIO on one tape?

[Mahesh Ganga]

Gurus,

I have some scripts that already use CPIO to back up files from a single directory to a tape device. I now have additional files in other directories that I want to backup to the SAME tape. Can I do it?? If so, how?

TIA,
Srikanth

[Mel Burslan]

I am not sure how you backed up your cpio to the tape but if you piped your output to a tar -cvf /dev/rmt/0m or something like this, you can alvay sadd files using -r option instead of -c to append to the tarfile

HTH

[KapilRaj]

Write your own script,

for DIR in $*
do
find $DIR -xdev -depth -print >>/tmp/list_bkp$$
done

cat /tmp/list_bkp$$ file and pipe it to ur existing backup script's CPIO function. Or use cpio -p so that it takes everything from STDIN.

Regds,

Kaps

[Steven E. Protter]

I looked at the man page for cpio for an hour and the only way i found was the second response or tar -rvf

SEP

[Stuart Browne · Accepted solution]

Use a no-rewind device, and just dump a second file onto the tape. No biggie.

At least this is what I do in both SCO (OpenServer & Unixware) and Linux systems.

The only caveat is that you need to do mulitple restores, as each file-mark ends on the tape, you need to issue another cpio command.

We use this method to back up 8-9 different machines around our office here. But we're small scale, only just starting to fill the 115GB Ultrim.

[KapilRaj]

Steve,

It means -p goes with only dir ==> dir ?

Anyway the post was my assumption i never tested it.

Kaps

[Mahesh Ganga]

Thanks for the quick replies.
I agree with Stuart. I happened to try that last night and it worked just fine. I am going to use that approach.

Thanks Again!