And more backup

[Darin Perusich]

mt on a redhat systems is part of the mt-st package, i looked on 
mandrakes ftp server and it has the same name. if it's not installed on 
the system, rpm -qa |grep mt-st then load up your cdrom and install, 
it's in the RPMS directory.

you don't need to erase a tape, there is no formatting you simple rewind 
it and write over the tape again. to run tar with -d you need to be in 
the root of where you tar archive starts. if /dev/st0 = / then you can 
you can do (cd / && tar -df /dev/st0) to check for differences.

if you want to check if your archive is "good" you really need to 
restore some files from the tape. i'd recommend creating a location to 
do all your restores in, like /dumps, /opt/dumps, /usr/local/dumps, just 
make sure that you have plenty of space on that filesystem.

in an earlier message you mentioned dabbleing with other backup tools. 
i'd recommend looking into amanda, www.amanda.org. i can't say enough 
good things about amanda. i've been using it for nearly 6 years on 
various systems, once you get it working all you need to do is change 
the tape nightly. i'm currently using it on a sun ultra5 with a sun L25 
tape library (1 LTO drive w/ 40 tape capacity). nightly we dump about 
200mb of data from about 50 seperate filesystems from linux, solaris, 
and openbsd systems. we also use it for dumping a small oracle database.

JJ Neff wrote:
> When I finally got back into my server and ran teh tar dvf /dev/st0 to compare
> teh tape archive with the fs All the files end with "Warnign, can't stat : no
> such file or directory"  Is the tape corrupt ?  SHoudl I just run tar again.
> 
> The RH guide at LDP suggests using mt -f /dev/st0 rewind to control the tape. 
> Where can I get mt and what is it I having trouble finding it in a Mandrake
> package...
> 
> Also if tape is corrupt how do I erase it completely or does startin a new TAR
> just overwrite anythign that was there?
> 
> TIA
> 
> JJN
> 
> __________________________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo
> http://search.yahoo.com
> 
> 


-- 
Darin Perusich
Unix Systems Administrator
Cognigen Corp.
darinper at cognigencorp.com