[rescue] Block size and the single DD

[Sheldon T. Hall]

 Kevin Loch said ...
>
> I thought the days of backing up directly to tape were long gone.

Well, it has to get to the tape somehow ...

> How about setting up a remote backup server with large
> disks and the dlt?

The SPARCclassic _is_ the remote backup server, as viewed from the SGIs,
albeit a remote backup server without a whole lot of disk space.  Or CPU
power.  Or network bandwidth.  It is, however, what I have.  It also runs
24/7, which makes running "pull" backups from cron pretty easy.

> Also, is there anything that xfsdump gives
> you that you wouldn't get from gnu tar?

I dunno.  I've never used gnu tar.  If I were going to a third-party backup
thingy, I might use J.Schilling's star, but I actually would rather use the
OS's stuff for this.  I've seen others burned by situations where they used
third-party backup solutions, then had difficulty restoring the
_backup_software_ when they had to do a bare-metal restore.  I'm not saying
that gnu tar would fall into that category, specifically, just saying why
I'd prefer the OS's tools to outboard ones.

Of course, SGI's own GUI backup tool uses cpio rather than xfsdump, but cpio
comes with IRIX.  However, the GUI backup tool doesn't restore things; it
has a warning that you have to use cpio from the command line to do that....

-Shel