On Mon, 06 Nov 2000, David Woollard-Kingston wrote:
This is a total newbie question but ...
I'm having a great deal of problems with backing up to tape. In fact I'm avoiding it at present and backing chunks of user files to a CDR at fairly regular intervals. I understand (from the manual) the process of engaging, retensioning etc. the tape but not how to actually perform the backup.
Fair enough. I presume, then, that you know how to use 'mt' (man mt) to control tape functions like rewinding and retentioning? If not, spend a couple of minutes getting to know it. You'll also need to know the device name of the tape drive (usually /dev/nst0). As for backups, there are a number of programs available (see soon...).
The KDE utility doesn't recognise that a tape is present and (as I
When I tried it, it seemed to be fairly random when it decided that a tape was present, and when it wasn't. Most of the time it thought it wasn't there, even though it was.
understand it) the YAST utility only creates a backup up volume on the disk itself. I have in the past on a previous release of Linux used BRU which seemed to work well but this doesn't seem to be part of the Suse release.
In my experience, the backup program I found most 'user-friendly' (and worked) was 'taper' (which probably will be on the SuSE CDs somewhere, if not already installed on your system). IIRC, you first run it with "taper -s" for a SCSI tape device, which will then set up appropriate configuration for you. It's a console menu-driven program (ncurses), and so should be reasonably intuitive to use. Saving that, there's the good ol' tar program :). Simple use: "tar -cf /dev/nst0 /directory-to-back-up". This will essentially create a dump of all the files and directories under the one you're backup up and write the dump to tape. To retrieve files, use "tar -xf /dev/nst0 [optional filenames]". To update the files onto the tape, use "tar -uf /dev/nst0 /directory-to-back-up". This puts any newer (or newly created) files onto the tape after the previous files. "man tar" is your friend :) Otherwise, search on http://freshmeat.net for "tape backup". There'll probably be something there which will suit your needs. HTH, Dan -- dankolb@ox.compsoc.net Oxford University Computer Society Secretary --I reserve the right to be completely wrong about any comments or opinions expressed; don't trust everything you read above--