how do you make backups on an Exabyte?

[Ben Taylor]

rvdp at cs.vu.nl (Ronald van der Pol) writes:


>I'm using SCO UNIX 3.2.2

I'm using SCO Xenix 2.3.2, but the concepts are basically the same.

>I want to do the following:
>- dumping on a 2.3 GB Exabyte tapedrive
>- both full and incremental dumps
>- many dumps on one tape
>- should be done by cron every night in multiuser mode
>- easy restoring
>- should work with emergency boot floppy and root filesystem

I've been slowly working on these items, including network backups.
I currently use tar to get the files off, but I need to start using CPIO
so that I can restore everything from tape.

I know that xenix needs the xnx155 upgrade to make CPIO backups that can
be restored from.  By the way, for those emergency boot/root floppies, any
one try and strip the kernel and load in a minimal tcp to reload from across
a network.  I'd be interested in know whats required.

>Problems with the standard SCO utilities:
>- find doesn't have an option to skip mounted filesystems

I wasn't aware that find could read an unmounted file system, if I read
what you're saying here correctly.  I'm not a guru.

>- backup(8) is only interactive (does it skip mounted filesystems??)

Never used it.

>- no facility for multi dumps

>My solution so far:
>- I use GNU find. It has an -xdev option for skipping mouted filesystems
>- find . -depth -print | cpio -ocvB > /dev/nrStp0   ??
>- after/before every dump a "echo 'filesystem dumplevel date' > /dev/nrStp0" ??
>- restoring by "tape rfm" (I have to carefully count the dumps :-( :-( :-(

I prefer to put a file named 'begin/system-name' touched when the backup
is being performed, and put any relevant info in this file.  Then do a tape
wfm, do the backup, another tape wfm, then a trailer which has a file
named 'end/system-name' touched after the backup is finished. Then one
last tape wfm.  I find it a heck of a lot easier to manage the information
we have on tapes.  (Yes, I know a tape wfm wastes 2 Mb, I have 2339 Mb on
the cartridge and never come close to filing one up).

Restoring is pretty boring, as I haven't had a chance to write the scripts
to parse a tape for a particular system.  

>Did you find a good easy useble solutions for making backups in SCO UNIX?

Its fairly easy to maintain, however its not something I can release cause
it pretty hack scripts right now and I'm short on time.

>--
>		Ronald van der Pol  <rvdp at cs.vu.nl>

Hope this helps.

Ben Taylor
Systems Administrator
LCC Incorporated
uunet!lccinc!bent

"My employer does not pay me for my opinion, neither should you."