[Techtalk] backup - tar

[maria]

Our file system is too large to fit on a tape without zipping it first.
   It has actually worked in the past, it's just doesn't work
consistently, and I can't figure out why not.  We prefer to do periodic
full backups to incremental, for reasons that I've never been quite sure
of...  I will take a look at dump and restore, and see if that might
work for us.

thanks a bunch,
maria

Laurel Fan wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 30, 2004 at 12:04:20PM -0700, Maria McKinley wrote:
> 
>>I am using tar to backup, and I am really frustrated with it.  It keeps 
>>going through a dozen or so files, and then quitting with no 
>>explanation.  It does this no matter which files I try to backup.  The 
>>command I use is:
>>
>>nohup tar -czvf /dev/nst0 --atime-preserve /home > /tmp/backup &
> 
> 
> I've never tried to use tar on an actual tape drive, so none of this
> is from actual experience.  Have you tried it without the z option?  I
> don't know how well gzipping interacts with writing to a tape device.
> Also, the 'dump' and 'restore' commands deal with backing up an entire
> filesystem, which looks like what you may be doing.  Dump also has
> incremental backup, which may be useful to you.  This page describes
> it:
> 
> http://surf.ap.seikei.ac.jp/~nakano/dump-restore/dump-restore-mini-HOWTO.en.html#s3
>