[lug] Tape Drives

[Mr Viggy]

I remember putting together a couple of scripts for a Sun box (SunOS 
4.X) to do nightly backups of our CAD system.

If I remember correctly, the script either used mt commands to get to 
the end of the archive(s) on the tape, and would put the next backup 
there; or it appended to the current archive on the tape.

Also, the script used the 'find' command to find all the files that were 
modified that day, and would only back those up.  About the only thing I 
had to do manually was switch tapes weekly.

Oh, yeah, all the archiving was done with tar.

Viggy

Ed Hill wrote:
> On Mon, 2002-10-28 at 13:07, Sexton, George wrote:
> 
>>Read the paper. You can't check a backup without doing a file compare.
> 
> 
> 
> Correct.
> 
> And theres no reason you can't accomplish the same with tar.  If you're
> sufficiently paranoid, you can easily do a round-trip archive--
> extract--compare session with standard GNU tools and (optionally) a bit
> of shell code.  Its quite easy.
> 
> So George, do you or a family member work for the Tolis Group?  ;-)
> 
> Mind you, I have nothing against commercial apps (use plenty of them on
> Linux: MatLAB, LabVIEW, etc.) but on LUG lists I generally point out the
> Free alternatives first.  Especially in cases such as tar, which in my
> experience is one of _the_ most reliable (and cross-platform!) GNU apps
> that I've ever used.
> 
> Ed
> 
> ps - If you can't accomplish the same with the GNU apps, I suggest 
>      *you* read up a bit starting with "info tar" and "info md5sum".
> 
>