On Thu, Feb 14, 2002 at 10:54:55AM -0000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> I have a 70GB disk which I don't want to devote a whole DLT to. I
> really need to backup individual partitions on the disk. We are
> running amanda on Solaris 7 and have been using dump to do our
> backups. I believe to get round this problem I could use tar but I've
> heard there can be problems with this, so what are they if there are
> any?
The issues I've run into using GNU tar with amanda under Solaris:
1: atime gets touched. Most of the time you don't care, but when you
really need it (usually forensics for me), atime is nice to have.
2: Estimate time can be pathologically long for some types of data.
Seems to be worse for large-numbers-of-small-files sort of file
systems? I never did figure it out completely, was still getting
timeouts occasionally with etimeout=3600, I gave up and went
to ufsdump. (I know there are some estimate hacks out there,
didn't have time to pursue that...)
3: Aside from estimate time, tar is a bit slower (though not as much
as you would think).
4: tar does have path-length and name-length restrictions.
> Also how do I go about backing-up and restoring using tar?
Aside from the excellent advice already given by Joshua, make sure
amanda knows where tar is:
% egrep GNUTAR config/config.h
--
Jay Lessert [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Accelerant Networks Inc. (voice)1.503.439.3461
Beaverton OR, USA (fax)1.503.466-9472
