[CentOS] Help with dump/restore

Fri Dec 28 16:02:34 UTC 2007
Joshua Baker-LePain <jlb17 at duke.edu>

On Fri, 28 Dec 2007 at 10:16am, Scott Ehrlich wrote

> So I recently installed an Overland Arcvault 12 tape library on a server to

What kind of tape drive is in there?

> I was using a script containing:
>
> /sbin/dump -0v -z2 -f /media/usb_drive/dump0 /home
>
> I played with restore on that, and it tested fine.
>
> For the tape, I thought it would be nice to add /var/log (should have done it 
> before, but didn't think of it...)

Is /var/log its own filesystem?  dump/restore is designed to work on
filesystems, not directories.  IIRC (I haven't used dump/restore in a 
while), full dumps will work OK (with some complaining) but incrementals 
won't work at all.

> 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

Depending on what tape drive you have and whether or not hardware 
compression is enabled, you may want to lose the -z.  You may want to 
anyway to save yourself the cycles.

> 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.

Erm, what options did you try, and what were the results?  Did you ensure 
the tape was positioned properly?

> 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.

I'm a big fan and long-time user of amanda, but it's appropriateness here 
depends on your needs (which you haven't fully spelled out).

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
QB3 Shared Cluster Sysadmin
UCSF