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From: karish@forel.stanford.edu (Chuck Karish)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt
Subject: Re: Backup info for RT Wanted
Summary: No-rewind tape device
Message-ID: <3030@portia.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 22 Jul 89 03:52:47 GMT
References: <12237@well.UUCP>
Sender: USENET News System <news@Portia.stanford.edu>
Reply-To: karish@forel.stanford.edu (Chuck Karish)
Organization: Mindcraft, Inc.
Lines: 37

In article <12237@well.UUCP> gors@well.UUCP (Gordon Stewart) wrote:
>
>Hello, I am trying to figure out how to do regular backups on 
>an IBM RT running AIX 2.2.1.

>I can't seem
>to give the backup command more than one volume to back up at once.

Time for a script!

>Nor does it appear to have a flag which allows incremental storage
>on my tape.  Is there any way of backing up several volumes to the
>same tape?

As far as I know, backup, like tar and cpio, doesn't know anything
about tape handling except what to do when it thinks it's run out of
media.  Choose the no-rewind tape device, and you'll be able to
put more than one archive on a tape.  On my system, that means
using /dev/rmt4 instead of /dev/rmt0.

>Does anyone out there have a script which controls the
>level of your back up by the current date.  

The easiest way to do this is to have the script accept the backup
level as an input parameter, and write a crontab entry to feed it
different numbers on different days.  Be sure to program the operator
to feed the tape drive different numbers of tapes, unless the intent is
to do full backups for different devices on different days.

Making sure that the tapes have accurate paper labels on them is an
important part of the process.  Backup can identify the partition,
level, and date from the file on tape, but it takes a long time to
retrieve this information if you don't know what's where when you
start.

	Chuck Karish		{decwrl,hpda}!mindcrf!karish
	(415) 493-7277		karish@forel.stanford.edu