how would a make a complete backup of all files spanning all file systems on my SCO box to tape?
i read somewhere:
find . -print | cpio -ocv > /dev/rStp0
from / ... will this do it??
(yes /dev/rStp0 is my tape drive)
are you just looking to make a backup of everything or are you looking to move the system to another box?
I usually use the -depth command to make sure it gets everything.
log in
cd to /
find . -depth -print | cpio -ocBv > /dev/rStp0
If you are looking for something to keep backing up your system I would look into lonetar or backupedge. their products work great with SCO and both of the products allow you to make Rescue Disks. These are a set of floppies that you can boot from, that will access the tape drive and then allow you to restore your system to a blank disk. It will even divvy the disk back to what it was.
good luck.
I am looking just to make a full backup of everything. ALSO, how would i make rescue floppy's for my SCO system???
Its been a while but I'm pretty sure that you log in as root and type
mkdev fd
and follow the prompts from there.
These are just a root FS disk and a boot fs disk. It will not reinstall your system like the "rescue" disks of some of the commercial products out there.
but the boot disks will be enough to get in and restore from the tapes using cpio correct?? I mean cpio is all you need to lay your entire system back down the way it was right?
no. I would not trust CPIO to restore a system. It does not do well with named pipes, special and device files. It will also not partition a new harddrive. CPIO is good for file restores. The root and boot disks just give you access to the harddrive if you forget the root password or you have to do some maintenance and cannot boot the system from the hard drive.
If all you have are cpio backups and you have to replace your hard drive and restore your system you will have to install SCO fully and then restore the CPIO tape. This usually works but there can be some issues afterwards but nothing that cannot be fixed. I've had to do this a few times although I only have 2 customers running SCO and don't do as much as i used to with it.
If you are responsible for a SCO system and its a production system with important data on it I would HIGHLY recommend looking into the two products that I mentioned. There might be others out there but I have personally worked with and still use the ones mentioned. Those products use a modified version of tar that does backup links, named pipes, special and device files. they create their own "rescue disks" that are much different from the SCO root and boot. These disks will partition the drive to what it was when they were created. install the tape drive that was present when they were created and look for a "Master" backup tape and restores the entire system from that tape.
The "Master" backup is a type of backup that you set in the software on what type of backup to run. You can also do incremental backups.
I had a system go down about 6 mos ago with a bad hardrive. They used Backup edge and did Master backups every night. These are the steps I followed.
1) had onsite tech replace drive
2) had onsite tech insert rescue disk 1
3) had the tech insert rescue disk 2 when prompted
4) had tech insert previous nights backup tape
5) waited two hours and the system was restored. Completely.
Its well worth the cost of the software. As with any backup plan you need to make sure your backups are good and keep your rescue disks current if you change hardware. For what its worth both products work great but I've gotten better support from Backup Edge tech support.
OK, i used the command you provided:
find . -depth -print | cpio -ocBv > /dev/rStp0
to backup my server. Now how do i extract just one directory on the archive?? I want to specify a source directory and a target directory.
I don't remember the exact format for the command. I'm at another job site and don't have access to a SCO box here. I will get into a SCO box later ad confirm the commands. One thing you can do is get a listing ofthe tape to make sure the directories you want aer there.
run
cpio -ivt < /dev/rStp0 > /tmp/tape.list
-ivt willjust read the names off of the tape and te /tmp/tape.list is just a name for the file.
Once the file is created then vi the file and you should be able to search it for what you want. Another thing we need to check is the format. let me know if each line starts with ./ or with just a / this will be important during the restore.
hey it looks like this:
60640 root 0 May 09 15:48:26 2003 dev/usr
20640 root 0 May 09 15:48:26 2003 dev/rtech1
60640 root 0 May 09 15:48:26 2003 dev/tech1
etc...
i have a question regarding the use of the 'find' command.... wouldn't i be duplicating some directories in my backup if the parent directory is listed with all its child directories? here is a sample output:
find . -depth
/repod/log/rman_29.log
/repod/log
/repod/huk7kik0_1_1
/repod/i4k7n700_1_1
/repod
so if i pipe this to cpio, i would get the child /repod/log/rman_29.log and then it would be repeated with /repod/log? i would get the childs /repod/huk7kik0_1_1 and /repod/i4k7n700_1_1 and then everything would repeat again with /repo?
is there a way to just get the last depth?
Not sure what your asking but cpio works fine for SCO.
A typical command would be
" find . -print | cpio -ocumvdB -O/dev/rStp0
This backs up the folders and the child folders and files only once.
Your just seeing the absolute path from the pwd.
tests have shown you are correct. thank you.