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On Mon, 2004-06-21 at 23:10, Kyle Korndoerfer wrote:
Sorry for a seemingly newbie question, but...
I have an HP SureStore DAT8 (DDS2; /dev/st0) tape drive that I would like to use to backup my home server running Suse 9.0 Pro. The problem is that almost all of my mount points use ReiserFS, so I can't use dump (similar to Solaris' "ufsdump", which is where my tape backup experience lies).
I would like to have a cron script that runs a full backup once a week with incremental backups performed nightly the rest of the week (appended onto the tape for better tape utilization and easier restores). After the last incremental for the week, the tape is ejected and the next tape is inserted.
How can this be accomplished under SuSE 9.0 Pro? Is my only alternative to use 'tar'?
If so, can someone point me to a good tutorial on this. I've never used tar to tape, just as a userland tool writing to disk.
Also, I've come across some articles that say using GZip compression when tar'ing to tape is a bad idea (can't recover from any/small errors). How else would I use/enable compression so that I can backup 8GB instead of the native 4GB on DDS2 tapes?
Thanks in advance for any help that can be provided.
-={ Kyle }=-
Trying to backup 8GB of data to a 4GB (native) tape will never work. When compression ratios are quoted they assume 50% compression which is wishful thinking. Binary files will never compress 50% if at all. Look at Arkeia as an alternative for doing your backups. It has been a couple of years since I used it but it very good. -- Ken Schneider unix user since 1989 linux user since 1994 SuSE user since 1998 (5.2)