using cpio to create hard drive backup file
 

Hello,

I've been running Redhat 8.0 on an HP box with standard services like web and ssh, for more then a year. I would like to back up the machine (4gigs < data <10gigs) in any practical way. I have an external USB 120 gig hard drive mounted with a 20 gig linux partition formatted (mke2fs -T largefile4 /dev/sda3). After creating a custom file list to back up, I use the command:

# cat file.list | cpio -o --format=crc > full-backup.cpio

All seems well:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6170300928 Oct 19 13:06 full-backup.cpio

To test my backup, I'm trying to create a file list to diff with the input list, and maybe pull out a sample file to check. When I do the following, I get and error:

# cpio -i --list --format=crc < full-backup.cpio > output.list
cpio: standard input is closed: Value too large for defined data type

and the output.list file is empty.

Any thoughts on how to fix? Any thoughts on a better backup solution? Having auto-backups would be great too :)

Bob

I use partimage to make backups with but I did try cpio to see what kind of problem you might be having. I didn't put any extensions on the file name but I don't know if that matters. Here's what I did and you can look to see if anything clicks.

mkfs.ext3 /dev/hda2
mkdir /mnt/test
mount /dev/hda2 /mnt/test

Then I checked the list ....
Both operations worked just fine.

Thanks for your reply.

I set up a test of mine own and it works fine for just a few files with a few bytes in them. Can someone help me with backing up 78666 files that total about 20 gigs?

Thanks,
Bob