Scott, I'm going to cut to the chase and tell you to go and setup Bacula on your system at work and stop screwing around with dump/tar/cpio and whether to open your tape drives in SYSV or BSD style (i.e. rewind on close).
Just install Bacula, test the tapes with 'btape', test the jukebox (using the base 'mtx' tool, then the Bacula mtx-changer script) and be done with it. There's a reason professional admins try to use better tools than plain dump/tar/cpio these days, especially once backups start having to span more than a single tape. It's NOT trivial to get this right, so just setup a tool which handles all this for you and don't worry about it as much. Now some people will complain and say that they don't trust any backup tool which won't let them get their data back using 'mt' to position the tape and then 'tar' to extract the data. They're living in the friggin past. As someone who's used Legato Networker for over 10 years now, I can't recall any situations where Legato has failed to get my data back from tape. I've been using Bacula now for a couple of years at home and it too works extremely well. It's got it's issues, but it does do a good job, really. Really, you're wasting a bunch of time on low level backup issues which you should just punt to a tool which has done alot of the hard work for you. John _______________________________________________ bblisa mailing list [email protected] http://www.bblisa.org/mailman/listinfo/bblisa
