On Wednesday 05 February 2003 23:23, Matt Stamm wrote:
I'm still pretty new to Linux. I have a Samba server up and running and need to install tape backup before I can setup our in-house users on the server. Any suggestions on where to get started. I browsed the Suse documentation and didn't find anything on tape backup. I also checked YAST and didn't anything on setting up a tape drive or installing tape backup software.
Any suggestions on tape drives and software would be appreciated.
Matt
Matt, check out W. Curtis Preston's Unix Backup book (O'Reilly) and the associated site http://www.storagemountain.com. Much of both will be overkill for what you need, and deal with issues like 'how do I restore my major corporate data centre after enemy bombing', but the first chapters of the book are devoted to issues like recovering from 'bare metal' i.e. if the whole disk is trashed, and the use of the backup tools included in various *nixes. Well worth it. On a small server I use dump to write all the partitions to a SCSI DDS3 tape, you will find various scripts around the net capable of doing this. Here's one I use on an OpenBSD machine, simple and probably poorly written but works ok: #!/bin/sh #Backup script for full backup TAPE=/dev/st0 # mt -f $TAPE rewind if [ $? -ne 0 ] then echo "Tape not on line!" exit 1 fi # echo " Starting Full Backup ..." /sbin/dump -0au -f /dev/nrst0 /dev/rsd0a /sbin/dump -0au -f /dev/nrst0 /dev/rsd0d /sbin/dump -0au -f /dev/nrst0 /dev/rsd0e /sbin/dump -0au -f /dev/nrst0 /dev/rsd0f /sbin/dump -0au -f /dev/nrst0 /dev/rsd0g /sbin/dump -0au -f /dev/nrst0 /dev/rsd0h /sbin/dump -0au -f /dev/nrst0 /dev/rsd1d echo echo -n " Rewinding tape, hang about. " mt rewoffl You then make this executable and run it from root's crontab. You'd need to read man mt, dump, and restore, and change the partition names of course - that script isn't for Linux - but this kind of thing can successfully backup the whole machine so long as your tape has the capacity. HTH Fergus -- Fergus Wilde Chetham's Library Long Millgate Manchester M3 1SB Tel: +44 161 834 7961 Fax: +44 161 839 5797 http://www.chethams.org.uk