Systembackup on DAT tape

[Thomas Zwatz]

hello everybody,
I would like to know if there is a possibility to put the whole system including several partitions onto a DAT tape to recover the system after a crash (e.g. disk failure).
Best way, if possible - to boot from from the tape (SCSI drive) and start recovering from it.

Thanks in advance
Thomas

[Alex Glennie]

Thomas, try a search on the forum using "dat system recovery" I think this has been covered before and a lot of useful info already exists, if you still have questions post away

[Tim Malnati]

There isn't much in the HP Linux forum, so I did a quick search on my comp.os.linux. forums. There seems to be a variety of third party products out there that may handle what your looking to do. I can't vouch for any of them, but maybe it's a start. I'll quote some of my search results below:

"Microlite's Backup Edge does not do actual imaging, but it has an excellent
disaster recovery program which will also allow you to restore to a different
drive configuration."

"We had the same thing -- the RedHat rescue disk is almost worthless
for that type of recovery -- you have too add a lot too it. You may
want to try Tom's Root Boot (tomstrbt) at http://www.toms.net/ It is pretty easy to install -- has scsi drivers built it, and you can configure it. He has an addon directory so you can add the dump/restore utilities."

"BRU is my favourite check it out at http://www.estinc.com/
and CRU too. (Backup and Recovery Utility, Crash Recovery Utility)"

"While not a "traditional" backup package, I use PowerQuest's DriveImage
2.0 here to backup several different OSes including Linux, mainly to my
file server with periodic snapshots to CD-RW. It's a full partition
shapshot, though."

"I use a set of scripts written by Karen Kubat called "tob". These scripts
use either afio or cpio to back up to various media. I use tape and cpio.
You can find "tob" via <>, and I think there is
also a Debian package. These scripts can do differential backups, btw."

[Tim Malnati]

Found a boat load of Linux based backup/restore solutions at http://freshmeat.net/appindex/console/backup.html

[tony j. podrasky]

What size DAT are you using?

I have not heard of a LINUX boot tape, but if you create a boot floppy with the right files you'll be able to boot it, enable the DAT, and rebuild the disk.

[Mark W. Jeanmougin]

In order to be able to boot off of a tape (like in HP-UX), the computer's BIOS and the operating system must support the feature. I guess it would be possible for a SCSI card to support booting from tape, but I've never seen that feature.

Have you thought of creating a bootable CD with enough stuff on it to enable you to access your tape drive and then do the restore?