[K12OSN] Tape backup

[Les Mikesell]

On Wed, 2004-06-16 at 11:56, Mark Gumprecht wrote:
> Outstanding! It popped out. "mt -f /dev/nst0 eject" Now I just need to 
> figure out webmin backup.

The command 'dmesg' soon after booting, or 'less /var/log/dmesg' later
will show what device names are used for the physical devices as
they are found in the boot sequence.  The mt command defaults to
using /dev/tape, so if you symlink that to /dev/nst0 you don't have
to mention the name in the command.  If you want a simple command
line to backup to tape, I like to keep each filesystem in a separate
so I cd to the top of each and:
tar --one-file-system -cvf /dev/tape .
To restore, cd to where you want the files and
tar -xpvf /dev/tape
You can either use mt -fsf 1 to advance to the next file on the tape
or just repeat the tar command an extra time. It will fail on the
filemarks before the next run but the read will advance to the start
and the next time will succeed.

However, it is worth the trouble to set up amanda for a full-auto
system, especially if you have more than one computer involved.

---
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com