[TriLUG] backup to a remote tape drive

[Michael S Czeiszperger]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Hi--

I've been struggling with this for a couple of days, and now have to humbly 
admit I need advice. I've been trying to write some backup scripts for a 
Travan 20G tape drive. The system config is I need to back up from one 
machine with IDE drives to another machine with a SCSI tape drive.

First I tried dump, since I'm familiar with it, and after a few hours of 
working around rmt and rsh configuration issues got dump working fine with 
the remote tape drive. The big problem is the 20G tape seems to run out of 
space at 4G, which seems like a huge waste of tapes since they cost ~$80 
each, not to mention the hassle of using multiple tapes when a single tape 
should hold everything.

I then tried afio, which I read about in Running Linux. It seems like a 
winner since it will compress the backup, and claims to be more impervious to 
tape errors than just gzip'ing a tar. Unfortunately I can't figure out how to 
get the output over to the tape drive. I can't just save the data to a file, 
since there's no room on either the source computer or the target computer 
(with the tape drive) to store 20G worth of data. The ideal solution would be 
to send the output in a pipe from afio directly to the tape drive. I've tried 
piping through "rsh", but it doesn't seem to take data on stdio.

Note that the security situation is a development environment located behind 
a firewall, with all outside access from the outside-in cut off, i.e. we're 
not hosting anything.

Thanks for any suggestions,
- -- 
Michael S Czeiszperger
czei at webperformanceinc.com

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP 6.5.8

iQA/AwUBO6DJx1gOl/a4Fw2AEQIz2gCeOyr2tFJxI+OWjmhZTALTytwF1t8AnRYL
wwcL9DgAhatrbW3DwTB+Sqlp
=XRU2
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----