[lug] defragging

[Hugh Brown]

It will depend on the tape drive.  You might look into bru as a backup
solution, but tar is certainly cheaper.  On one system we have the tape
drive is /dev/st0 and /dev/nst0 (rewinding and non-rewinding).  It may
also be /dev/rmt*

I don't think you do mount the tape drive.  I believe you just write to
the appropriate device
file.


recreating the filesystem is done by using mke2fs (so man mke2fs is your
friend).

HTH,

Hugh


Michael Wegener wrote:
> 
> Sounds serious... Getting the tape drive operational is one of my next
> tasks. Is it as easy as I would hope? I'm assuming that I need to mount the
> tape drive (even tho' /dev doesn't seem to have anything I'd be sure was
> it) and then just dump tars to it. In fact, I don't even know how to
> recreate the filesystem (let alone set the block size, since I don't need
> to worry about lots of small files) w/o reinstalling the whole shebang from
> CD.
> 
> "Jeffrey B. Siegal" wrote:
> 
> > It generally isn't needed; Linux does a pretty good job of keeping the
> > file system naturally unfragmented.  But if you are radically
> > reorganizing your file systems, you might as well backup the files,
> > recreate you file systems and restore all the files.
> >
> > One thing that helps reduce fragmentation a little is to use a block
> > size of 4096 rather than the default of 1024 when creating the file
> > system. (Use the -b option on mke2fs.)  This will increase overhead for
> > small files though.