Tape backup using tar

[Joel Jaeggli]

On Thu, 4 Aug 2005, Stuart Bailey wrote:

>> It would also help us if you sent a sample of the command you used to
>> start tar to do the backup.  Usually with tar you need to specify the
>> -f /dev/nst0 or simular to backup to the drive.  You do have to
>> replace the /dev/nst0 with the device name for your tape drive.
> Sorry, I'm using:
> tar -cvf /dev/st0 <files list>

tar has a key problem for backing up hard-disks, not all flavors of tar 
support files greater than 2GB.

Once your device node issue gets solved you might consider using cpio 
whose c style header will work for those cases.

a sample cpio command line might look like:

  find -x . -print|cpio -oavB -H newc > /dev/st0

that stays on the the current filesystem.

removing the -x makes it do the whole tree if there are filesystems 
attached to sub-directories

If you want a bigger block size to make your tape streamer go faster 
remove the B and do --block-size=512 (256K) 1024 (512k) or 2048 (1MB)

if you want to bzip it:

find -x . -print|cpio -oavB -H newc | bzip2 -9 > /dev/st0

> However, after the previous response, I have noticed that /dev/st0 was an
> ordinary file, not a device file.
> I'm now trying to work out what it should be - I think mknod /dev/st0 c 9 0
> should do it.
>
> It's odd how this has changed - it was working fine before the update.
>
> Many thanks,
>
> Stuart.
>
>

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Joel Jaeggli  	       Unix Consulting 	       joelja at darkwing.uoregon.edu
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