[TriLUG] Backing up remote systems

[Bradford Powell]

On occasion I have used:

tar -cjvspSPlf - /home/bradford | ssh -C bradford at computer.with.tape.drive 
'dd bs=64k of=/dev/ctape'

I forget what all of the tar options do, some of them are probably
redundant. I don't compress the tar file but let the tape drive use its
hardware compression instead because this is supposed to prevent having 
an unreadable backup in case one block goes bad. I do use ssh -C, though
because the data goes over a 10 MiBit network. So the data gets tarred,
compressed by ssh and sent over the network, then decompressed, then sent
to the tape drive where it is again compressed.

If there's a better way to do this, I would be interested.

-- bradford
-- bradford_powell at unc.edu


On Wed, 27 Mar 2002, Kevin Hunter wrote:

> Anyone have tips on how to backup *nix boxes to a remote *nix box?
> Can I tunnel rdump through SSH? 
> 
> I'm a big fan of keeping it simple.  I'm even thinking of using a
> cron job to create tar.gz files of what I need to back up and scp'ing
> them down to the box w/ the tape drive?  Does this sound silly ??
>