Backing up a Linux system ...

[Anurag Jalan <a_jalan vsnl com>]

Hi all,

We have a RH 6.2 server with 2x9 Gb SCSI hard drives , and this machine
hosts pretty much everything on our network. For the last 9-10 months 
I had been using taper 6.9a to backup my entire system to an HP
C1599A DDS-2 SCSI DAT drive . Lately I've run into problems -- sometimes
when I select the spool directories, OR the Squid cache directories ,
taper loses the byte count eg from 3,718 Mb selected, it suddenly starts
showing say, 54 Mb ..however , when i deselect the 'offending' directory
taper shows the correct byte count .

I have found a great tar based script to backup the entire system in
Wrox's Linux deployment .. the script runs fine, but the system does
give out error messages. But the *main* problem is that restoring a 
single file from a 5-6Gb backup takes almost an hour !

I've heard that dds2tar is a hack of tar, that works great with DDS or
better devices . Could one of you please point me to some backup scripts
that I could modify for my own use ? I don't have the expertise to write
my own scripts from scratch :(

Thanks 

Anurag 

PS thanks to some wonderful help on this list, I moved my /home
to the new HD and /usr/local to the vacant partition !!!