tar killed Red Hat 3 ES
 

The Intel system with Red Hat 3 ES is new. I'm learning how to backup and restore files. Posting I have read here have helped with small backups. But now, I intend to backup the entire system to tape.

I signed on as root.
I opened a terminal window.

# cd /
# tar -czf /dev/st0 /

The system freezes. No response to keyboard or mouse.
Any thoughts? How do I backup the whole thing?:confused:

"The system freezes."

Aren't you getting into a recursion where you are trying to backup /dev/st0 onto /dev/st0?

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Be prepared. Create a LifeBoat CD.
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Steve Stites

Perhaps I am. If I can backup my entire DG-UX system, can I also backup my entire Linux system? Otherwise, how would the /dev directory get backed up at all?

Correct me if I am wrong (because I definitely could be) but I thought the syntax was tar -czvf <filename> <what to tar>

I am by no means an expert, but I also dont know why you would use /dev/st0 in your tar statement. To backup the whole root directory I would use tar -czvf /mnt/store/backup.tar /*

Let me know if I am wrong or if I helped please :)

"Otherwise, how would the /dev directory get backed up at all?"

You could backup /dev to a tar file in /tmp or /mnt. Then do a system tar backup to /dev/st0 which excludes /dev. This makes restoring /dev more complicated than restoring the rest of the system but otherwise should work OK.


___________________________________
Be prepared. Create a LifeBoat CD.
http://users.rcn.com/srstites/LifeBo...home.page.html

Steve Stites

holy shit ! use 'dump' and 'restore', they are much easy and 'trustable' !

And use a per-filesystem device name for the backups. I mean, when I want to backup /, I do it with /dev/hda1, which will backup only what belongs to root, not including /var, i.e. Afterwards I backup /dev/hda3 (i.e., /var)

To Pablob: I use tar because in the RedHat Enterprise Linux 3 Intro to Systems Administration documentation, there is a note from Linus Torvalds discouraging the use of dump in favor of tar/cpio/xxx solutions.

To Jailbait: I was able to bypass the system freezing by doing the backup in text mode rather than in GUI mode.

To Gates1026: I'm willing to investigate tar syntax combinations. Thank you for your suggestion.