> > Question: How do I communicate with this tape drive? It is the only SCSI > device in the system and I have no experience with SCSI devices. Since it's a tape, it doesn't have a filesystem so you can't really mount it. All you do is write to the raw device (like /dev/sd0 or whatever). > > I need to figure out how to mount it somehow so I can use dd, cpio, tar, etc. to > write to it. Would Amanda be a good tool to use? All of those tools would work. I'd stay away from dd - it'll work, but isn't the best tool for the job. cpio works ok. tar is a really nice backup tool. Amanda is good and it can interface with any of the afore-mentioned tools to do backups as well as plain ol' "dump". > > If anyone could point me to some how-tos or web sites that could help I would > appreciate it. I may pick up the O'Reilly book 'Unix Backup and Recovery' in > the next day or two - I think that it could be valuable considering my level of > expertise at the moment. Yes. If you're going to be doing backups, you _must_ have this book. I got this book knowing little about backups (maybe more than you know now, but not by much). In no time, I was planning out a 10 gig/night backup with a full pledged disaster recovery plan. Unix Backup and Recovery is _the_ best O'Reilly book I've ever purchased. Get it right now! :) It's 40% off at www.bookpool.com (as is every O'Reilly book). Gabe -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Gabe Turner | X-President, UNIX Systems Administrator, | Assoc. for Computing Machinery U of M Supercomputing Institute for | Univerisity of Minnesota Digital Simulation and Advanced Computation | dopp at acm.cs.umn.edu "No sir, I don't like it!" - Mr. Horse in "Fire Dogs" -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: tclug-list-unsubscribe at mn-linux.org For additional commands, e-mail: tclug-list-help at mn-linux.org