Hey all, this is my first post here, hope I dont violate any rules. Anyway my problem is that I have a backup to tape job built that back's up our whole system. When it runs I have it set to print a report. The report states this: cpio: warning: skipped ### bytes of junk. Our OS is CentOS, cant give you a version number right now, I will add it later. I am at a loss as to why this is happening. I have formated the tapes, I have sucessfully wrten to them befor, the only difference is that I am doing a full system backup this time and not just a few dir. like I was befor. I was thinking that some files may still be in use, and cant be coppied. Any help would be apreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Robert

Maybe this doesn't directly address your question, but why did you choose cpio? The most commonly relied upon method for writing tapes is gnutar.

I do use cpio occasionally. I have a daily script that does incrementals of my amanda directory to catch my indexes and logs after backups have completed. It looks like this:

find /usr/local/etc/amanda -mtime -1 | cpio -oa 2>/dev/null | ( cd ${ADIR} && cpio -imd );;

Then I tar and gzip those directories and scp them to another server.

So, in that scenario I'm using ufsdump within amanda for tape backups, cpio to get incrementals of my amanda directories, and tar to wad that up and shoot it to another server. It's not that I can't make up my mind. It's just that I think each of those is appropriate for the particular situation.

If I were not on Solaris, I would use gnutar instead of ufsdump for the tape backups within amanda.

the only reason that I used cpio is because that's how the walkthrough I found said to do it. I would love to here some other way to do it, such as Tar ect..

I am a nub to Linux and all, and I do tend to learn things the hard way.

Thanks for the quick response,
Robert

Well, as a general rule, start with the man pages. man tar.

You could google around, but that can be overwhelming when the topic has too many general keywords. I found http://www.linuxselfhelp.com/gnu/tar..._9.html#SEC128 which gives some examples with multiple archives on a tape.

The one difference between their examples and what I usually do is that I typically use the v option for verbose. To me it is somewhat comforting to see the terminal scrolling up rapidly so that I know it is doing stuff.

If you get comfortable with that, have lots of computers to do, and find that it's getting to be too much manual labor, then you could always adopt amanda http://www.linuxquestions.org/bookmarks/tags/amanda and let it manage and schedule your gnutar, gzip and tapes. But that's probably overkill if you are just learning and just doing your own computer. On the other hand, if you are pushing yourself to learn more, you might. ;-)

Thanks choogendyk for all of the information. I think I will try out gnutar.

Thanks again,
Rob