[K12OSN] Tape backup

Henry Burroughs hburroughs at HHPREP.ORG
Wed Jun 16 16:32:02 UTC 2004


>From what I know, you will not see the tape drive listed under fstab. 
Try running "mt -f /dev/st0 status" and see what it says. It took me a
while to get my backups running (custom shell script around good ole
dump)!  Your best friend will probably be "man mt"... I have played
around with it a little bit (rewinding, ejecting, etc)... so  a good
test for you would probably be "mt -f /dev/st0 eject" to see if the tape
ejects... or at least goes "not in use" for you to remove the tape...
which is what my drive does.

It being on /dev/st does sound strange... it probably is /dev/st0 and
also /dev/nst0 (they refer to the same tape device, it just is when you
use /dev/st0, it will rewind the tape after every operation and
/dev/nst0 will not... usefully if you are using 2 dumps on a tape and
don't want the 2nd dump to rewind the tape and overwrite the first!)  I
sym-linked /dev/tape to /dev/nst0 (no rewind operations... I rewind
manually/when I need to).

There was a good explanation on the internet that showed how file
positions and EOF markers are used, but I can't find it... oh well.

Henry Burroughs


> From: Timothy Legge <tlegge at rogers.com>
> To: Support list for opensource software in schools. <k12osn at redhat.com>
> Subject: Re: [K12OSN] Tape backup
> Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2004 12:58:23 -0300
> 
> On Wed, 2004-06-16 at 12:36, Mark Gumprecht wrote:
> > I have a dell power edge server with a dlt1 tape drive. I'm running 
> > Redhat 9.0 with the LTSP 3.1.2 loaded. The install sees the tape drive 
> > in the hardware browser as dev/st. Not as dev/st0/1/2/3... . Anyone know 
> > how to get this to be mountable? I checked the /etc/fstab and there is 
> > no listing for the tape drive and wasn't sure on how to enter it, file 
> > type and such.
> 
> For a DDS2 and 4 I have used the information on Amanda at fedoranews. 
> It works and after a few backups I have been able to recover files.
> 
> Tim






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