Date: 11 Oct 1999 01:50:16 +0200 From: naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de (Christian Weisgerber) To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: backup method reccommendation? Message-ID: <7tr8no$89m$1@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de> References: <19991009123827.E12733@uberhacker.org>
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Paul D . Schmidt <pds@uberhacker.org> wrote: > come up with a good method for backing up my system. I was reading about > dump/restore, but a dump backup couldn't be used to restore from a 3.2 > system to a 3.3 system, How did you get that idea? I strongly suggest to use dump/restore. > I thought about using tar, then I can just tar everything up and then > selectively restore files or directory trees.... tar as shipped with FreeBSD can't backup all devices in /dev. > but I'm a bit confused about the multi-volume aspect of tar....would > the following command line prompt me to change tapes after it has > backed up 2GB? (and keep going thru as many tapes as it needs?) > > tar cvplML 1930 / Yes. You probably don't want tar to be verbose here. Also, the p modifier is a nop for creating archives. Your root file system is 2+ GB large? > (I did some experiments and it uses the tape drive properly w/o an f arg) Coincidence. tar defaults to some device, but this default varies, e.g. I see an increasing number of Linux people who take it for granted that tar uses stdio by default. I strongly suggest to always either name the archive explicitly with the f modifier or to set the TAPE environment variable. > Also, I would need to do something like mt rewind before starting my > backup, correct? Customarily tapes are rewound at the end of the backup. Also, some (all?) tape drives rewind any newly inserted tape. > Since you have to explicitly state the tape size on the command > line I'm assuming I have to pretend the hardware compression isn't > there and just use the maximum guaranteed size of 2GB as opposed > to "up to 4GB"? You shouldn't need to give the tape size. There's a well established standard for the driver to return a short write when it meets the end of tape. The backup program will recognize this and prompt for a new tape. Both tar and dump support this. Try it. If it doesn't work (I guess this feature is somewhat prone to breakage) send in a bug report. -- Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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