On Thu, Feb 14, 2002 at 09:22:10AM -0800, Jay Lessert wrote: > 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.
Assuming atime isn't actually _used_ by amanda (I can't imagine it would be), you could hack the amanda source to add --atime-preserve to the tar options. Not sure what version of GNU tar this appeared in ... check your manpage. > > 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. > If this is a _big_ problem, the source for tar could be modified. It's been a while, but I seem to recall the GNU tar source is reasonably understandable. > > 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 > -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Dan Wilder <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Technical Manager & Editor SSC, Inc. P.O. Box 55549 Phone: 206-782-8808 Seattle, WA 98155-0549 URL http://www.linuxjournal.com/ -----------------------------------------------------------------
