Date: Sat, 3 Jan 1998 14:39:55 -0600 From: "Jason Hudgins" <jasonh@cei.net> To: <questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Good backup hardware for FreeBsd? Message-ID: <005401bd1887$d6308ec0$7a76b4cc@thanatosis>
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>I'm in a similar situation. What happens for you is that the tape has >reached the end (my guess; I get write errors when I reach >end-of-tapes), and is trying to tell you this on the tty; "fopen on >/dev/tty" means that it cannot talk to a console, probably because >you're running it from cron, or detached the dump process from the >tty. I don't think this is the case, because some of the time it actually works, just not often. And it dies at random times, sometimes at say 25% sometimes at 85%, ...etc...etc. >AFAIK, you can't run dump from cron, at least not directly. (I'd like to >hear from you folks! How do you make automated dumps?) Dump needs >user interaction when an error or end-of-tape occurs, or it will get >suspended or fail. Again, I've gotten it to work from cron, though I've never tried to call dump from cron directly. My cronjob calls a perlscript that first rewinds the tape, and then does a dump of /usr to /dev/nrst0. The perl script redirects the output of dump and logs it into a PostgresSQL database, which I then can examine from some web pages.. Its a pretty nice setup, but then again, I only get a successful backup about 15% of the time. When I originally had it setup, for the first two weeks, it was working 100% everyday, but then it started failing, and now it hardly ever works. I use a different tape every day of the week, and they are 4 gig cartridges. My whole /usr filesystem maybe has about 2 gigs of data on it.. >What does your dump command look like? If your tape can swallow no more >than 2GB, you've reached the end-of-tape. Using the B option, yuo can >tell dump about the tape lenght, and get "tape-end" instead of >"write-error". If you expect hardware compression, are you sure it is >switched on? Probably not? something like this, (from memory) dump -0uf /dev/nrst0 /usr I'm not opposed to purchasing new backup hardware if anyone has any solid suggestions. Of course I still haven't completely determined if its a hardware failure, but that my best guess.. Jason
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