BackingUP!

[JJ Neff]

Thanks to Justin, I am now a backing up fool!  Justin was able to loan an older
external SCSI tape device and I was able to scrounge up parts for it.  Tonight
I have a tar command actually backing up my home dirs on my server.  I am one
step closer to being able to format this thing!  

I may actually wait to format now since I want to see if I can get a real
backup rotation going.  THe LDP site has a very easy to follow cron rotation to
use in the Redhat guide...
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/solrhe/Securing-Optimizing-Linux-RH-Edition-v1.3/chap29sec306.html

I'm using tar because I want to backup my home and etc and opt and maybe some
var OK maybe a FULL backup , then I want to format and install a diff distro
(Debian on my server, mandrake 9.1 on my workstation.

SO I figure tar is the easiest way to get the files archived then off again. as
long as I have an /export/home dir on my newly installed system.  I may want to
dabble with other backup tools that use DBs (we use a very involved backup
utility, Arcserve, at work) but I didn't know what to do with the DB when I
formatted.  I would have to reread all the tapes back in to rebuild the DB,
seemed like a waste when I know what I want to backup and restore.  But I
suppose in the future if I want to search for a specific file a DB would be
more helpful..  Oh well I'll learn, any advice is welcome.

Getting the tapoe device was an absolute breeze, I was worried becasueI have an
Adaptec 2940UW and I was afraid I had used both teh 50 and 68 pin internal
ports making my external useless, but I had used a narrwo to wide adapter on my
cdrom to keep from having to use the 50 pin port.  So all I had to do was
reconfigure the SCSI term settings inteh adadpter and set the SCSI id on the
device and configure that IDs specific settings in the adapter and reboot one
more time.  One complete reboot and I was back up with a tape device.  Man they
say Linux is Hard :-)

Figuring out all the cmd line switches for tar was a littel touhg but I
followed the examples in the LDP guides, read the man pag and in under one hour
from starting have all my home drives backed up.  I going to backup my full
system on a seperate tape excluding the home dirs.  Then I can finally use all
18GB of space instead of using software Raid 1 to try to give me some fault
tolerance.  I can finally store a lot of files on my drive and not worry too
much since I am backing up.  Man what a weight off my shoulders.  OK they may
fail when I need them but heck it's only MP3s movies and pics of my son that I
have on CD...

:-)

Please any backup suggestions or links are welcome.

JJN

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