SUMMARY: Backup while in multi-user mode

[Booker Bense]

In article <1991May24.013214.2526 at servalan.uucp> rmtodd at servalan.uucp (Richard Todd) writes:
>peter at ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
>
>>What I don't understand is why people are still using "dump" to do backups?
>>A pretty minimal script using "find -newer level-file" and "cpio" works just
>>fine on active file systems.
>
[stuff about dump being better ]
>--
>Richard Todd	rmtodd at uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu  rmtodd at chinet.chi.il.us
>	rmtodd at servalan.uucp

- Well, I've been wrestling with this problem for some time now. I
sort of run things on a network that consists of 2 Ultrix Decstations,
3 VMS/vaxstations and some xterms. The VMS disks are visible from the
decstation using UCX. We have one 1.2 gig DAT hanging off a Decstation
and I am attempting to implement a reasonable backup stragety.

-First you have to define why you are backing up. I have two goals in 
mind. 

1. Disk crashes

	- Need to recreate enough of the environment to be useful. 

2. Pilot Error 

	- Backups for accidental deletion by users. 

- These two objectives have totally different goals and I have come to 
the conclusion that TWO different backup strageties are needed. 

- To implement the first I do ``dump''s of the major filesystems onces a
month. I come in on a saturday and do this with no one on the machine.
After this discussion , I'll do it single-user mode.

- For the second I have set NFS up so root on the machine with the DAT
can read any file on the network ( either VMS or Ultrix ). With
various combinations of find and egrep -v I create a list of files
from the ``user filesystems'' and use GNU tar to dump this list onto
the end of a tar archive. This job is run by cron every night. GNU tar
has enough flexiblity that I can get only the ``latest version'' of
the file off the archive when neccessary. I also have utilities that
will take care of converting VMS var. record length to Stream lf
format. This has proven far more useful than the dump tapes and is
relatively automatic. ( I only have to change tapes about once a month
).

- The hard part has been convincing the kernal that the tape drive
really was capable of 1.2 gigs. Many thanks to Don Rice in
comp.unix.ultrix for the helpful advice. 

- Booker C. Bense                    
prefered: benseb at grumpy.sdsc.edu	"I think it's GOOD that everyone 
NeXT Mail: benseb at next.sdsc.edu 	   becomes food " - Hobbes