Shawn Fertch wrote:
> I looked at it a while ago, and was helpful.  One which would be helpful to add, IMO, would be to show an option on how to compress data going through tar.
> 
> A question I have about tar:  Can it span tapes?  If so, how and would it be worth the risks?  I have an old DDS-1 drive.  The old 4GB of compressed data limitation kind of sucks.

man tar for answers to both of your questions:

to compress files via tar:

       -z, --gzip, --ungzip
              filter the archive through gzip

yes, it can span multiple tapes.  I've done this without problems.  As
always YMMV.

       -M, --multi-volume
              create/list/extract multi-volume archive

> Scot, can you show an example of your scripts?  Would be good to see how you do it for ideas.  I have some external machines to backup, so scp will be used instead.

my scripts are complicated and require function libraries, etc.  
basically it goes like this:

# full backup of /home; for partial (everything since the last full) use
# a '1' instead of '0'; you can have up to 9 dump levels depending on
# how complicated you want to get.
/sbin/dump -0auf /<backup_partition>/home-full.dump /home

# make a table of contents (TOC)
/sbin/restore tvf /<backup_partition>/home-full.dump > \
	/<backup_partition>/home-full.list

# compress backup and TOC
nice -15 gzip -f /<backup_partition>home-full.dump
nice -15 gzip -f /<backup_partition>home-full.list

man dump to see what the options all mean.

as far as remote backups via scp, similar to above but dd is your friend:

ssh remotehost -C "/sbin/dump -0auf - /home | \
	dd of=/<backup_partition>/remotehost-home-full.dump

this ssh's to remotehost and dumps the /home partition which is piped
to the dd command (which runs on the host you want to store the backups
on); dd writes the output file (of=).  If you setup ssh keys to allow
the host doing the backup to ssh to the remotehost without a password
you can run this backup from cron without user intervention.

> On a side note, I've been seeing an ad in the past couple of LJ's for a free personal edition of Storix.  Never heard of them, but worth looking into:
> 
> http://www.storix.com

never heard of this product before.  Interesting.  Amanda and BRU are pretty 
popular backup software too.

-- 
-scot