Best way to backup SCO Xenix/UNIX

[Wu Liu]

/--sean at utoday.com (Sean Fulton) said...
| In article <1991Apr7.044627.5298 at ucselx.sdsu.edu> aty at ucselx.sdsu.edu (young a t) writes:
| >
| >Got to be careful with this.  We recently had the disk controller crash
| >on our 3B2 system, which had been backed up with cpio as you describe.
| >The disks we lost had all the users' home directories.  So we said,
| >OK, we'll just restore those guys on the SUN workstation from the
| >backup tapes, right?  Wrong.  The SUN version of cpio can't read
| >multi-volume backups; we only saved the guys who were on the first
| >tape.  There are probably other Berkeley-derived systems whose cpio
| >can only read one tape.  BEWARE!
|
| We're running SCO Unix 3.2.2 with a 40 M Irwin tape drive. I
| consistently run into cpio problems restoring from more than one tape.
| Note that this does *not* occur when using sysadmsh to do the backup,
| but when I try to do it freehand, I run into problems. The method to
| date has been:
| 
| 	find / -print | cpio -ovcB >>/dev/rctmini
| 
| 	When restoring, I use:
| 	
| 	cpio -ivcdB </dev/rctmini
| 
| 	but always hit a tape read error at the end of the first tape
| and can't pick up on my second or third.
| 
| 	Is it possible I'm just running out of tape too soon (I have
| the default at 37 M on an allegedly 40 M tape), or is it something
| else?
|  /* The opinions expressed above are not those of my employer */
\--

Try specifying the size of the tape with the -K option.  For a 40mb
tape, use either 40000 or something slightly less, depending on how
confident you are that the tape is of the correct length.

Also, you might consider backing up by filesystems, with the -mount
option to find.  For example:

    # cd /
    # find . -mount -print | cpio -ocdmuvB -O/dev/rctmini -K40000

will back up your entire root filesystem onto QIC-40 tape(s) without
straying into any user filesystems you have set up.

The -K option to cpio is documented in the cpio(C) on-line man page.