[rescue] Tape Backup

[Jeremy RJ Towers]

Hi Sheldon,

Your very greatest increase in reliability will come from not using 
ufsdump on mounted partitions.

Note the first paragraph in the man page of ufsdumps. They aren't 
joking. And no, don't ask how I know this or why I feel strongly about it.

The bottom line is garbage in = garbage out.

Veritas Netbackup uses gnu tar, which has more features than ordinary 
tar, and can lock files on a file by file basis, and cope with pipes etc.

cpio is fairly universal between Unix systems.

HTH

Jeremy

Sheldon T. Hall wrote:

>Folks-
>
>I have, and even use, an HP SureStore 5000 DDS-2 tape drive for backup.  I
>use it in its low-density (2 GB) mode, since it seems to me that his would
>be more reliable.
>
>It has, however, written some tapes that I couldn't read, later, when I
>needed them.
>
>I use ufsdump to write the backup tapes.  This is at home, but the data
>backed up includes data important to my wife's business, as well as items
>I'd rather not do without.
>
>So ... my questions:
>
>Is this an OK drive?
>
>Would running it in compressed mode be any less reliable than normal mode?
>
>Is there some tweak to ufsdump that would increase reliability? (I'm backing
>up mounted filesystems during quiet times)
>
>Would some other drive be better?
>
>Anyone got a "some other drive" I could rescue cheaply?
>
>If you think I should get something else, but don't have one, what should I
>get?  What should I avoid?
>
>Thanks.
>
>-Shel
>
>--
>Sheldon T. Hall
>shel at cmhc.com
>206-780-7971
>_______________________________________________
>rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue