Scott Ehrlich wrote:
So I recently installed an Overland Arcvault 12 tape library on a server to back up /var/log/ and /home.
[...]
Trying to adapt the knowledge to a tape library...
/sbin/dump -0 -v -z2 -f /dev/nst0 /var/log /sbin/dump -0u -v -z2 -f /dev/nst0 /home
I have a cron job that dumps the results to /var/log/dump.log, and a review of the log file claims all went well. Now for the restore...
I just tried playing with different options of restore, but could not successfully restore anything. I ensured I was in a scratch area so as to hopefully not overwrite current files.
What is the proper procedure for dumping and restoring now? Should I be dumping to /dev/nst0/dump? What restore commands would I use to recall a file?
I'd like to keep things as simple as possible - people have suggested legato and amanda, but for now, I would think/hope dump and restore would work.
First you need to determine if your problem is with dump or the tape drive. Dump tends to be unhappy if the filesystem changes during the run, so you might be better off using tar. Also, some tape drives are picky about the block size used in writing and reading. You can use the mt command to check/set the block size for the tape, and both dump and tar have block size options that you can set to match.