[SunHELP] native backup tools

[Doug McLaren]

On Wed, Apr 25, 2001 at 07:34:51PM -0400, Alan Rubin wrote:

| is there a solaris native backup tool that can backup and compress a
| filesystem on the fly to 8mm tape?  can it be done on the fly by adding a
| simple gnu tool like gzip?  our aim is to backup our legato /index
| partition/directory to a local tape to help our disaster recovery
| situation out, but its too big to fit on the native size of a tape (4gb i
| think).

Native to Solaris you'd have dump and tar.  You might be able to do
something like this -

   dump ... - | gzip -9 > /dev/tape_device

or

   tar -cvvf - /nsr-indexes | gzip -9 > /dev/tape_device

or if you get GNU tar from ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/tar, you can
do this -

   GZIP=-9
   export GZIP 
   tar --totals -zcvvvf /dev/tape_device /nsr_indexes

Of course, you'll need to have gzip for these -- compress would work
too, but it doesn't compress nearly as well.  bzip2 compresses a tad
bit better but it's a lot slower.

You may find that merely mirroring these files on another computer
(with rcp, scp or rsync) may be all that you need.

Note that these files may already be somewhat compressed, which will
mean that gzip won't be able to compress them much more.  I guess
you'll have to try it and see first.

-- 
Doug McLaren, dougmc at frenzy.com
Join the collective.                            Meet distinctive individuals.
Travel to distant eco-spheres.                  And assimilate them.