I must to change any settings in a backup schedule, because I have notice that this task doesn't not make any compression (35GB)

Actually command is something like
star -l [some parameters] -v f=$DEVICE -C /home $DIRS

I think that I need to add a gzip pipe
star -l [some parameters] -v f=$DEVICE -C /home $DIRS | gzip
but I think that it needs some additionals parameters - any helps? I look into man pages of star, but it's very cryptic. There are some switch -z, -j, but I can't find any example...


Could you help me ??

Please have patience - I'm a newbie

Thanks a lot
Giovanni Rastelli

I think the problem you might be having is with

Is $DEVICE a tape drive?

If so the star man page has an example on how to star, gzip, and send the output to a tape:

So you would basically do what you're currently doing, but just not use f=$DEVICE in star:

This also assumes that "sdd" is installed on this server. If not, "sdd" is a modified version of "dd" so "dd" might work just as well.

If you were sending the output to a file rather than a device, star would look like this:

or

I hope that makes sense...

Thanks for the answer.
Backup is sent to a tape device.

I will try...

Giovanni Rastelli

What sort of tape device? Does it have compression?

I have a HP C7438A - Storage DAT 72
I think that have compression (I can't find page with details)

The person who create this backup script (another IT company) has insert this line in the script
mt -f $DEVICE compression on 2> /dev/null

so I think that this device must to compress data

For your information I send you log backup

DAT72 -- so, you should get 36G on the tape without compression if things are running smoothly. With compression on, depending on your data types and their compressibility, you could get up to 2:1 compression; though, in practice, that's optimistic at best.

How much data are you sending? If you look at your /var/log/messages, do you see any errors that might relate to the tape drive? When was the last time a cleaning tape was used on the drive? If you have some disk space available for testing, try doing the tar to a disk file and then try gzipping it. That would tell you at least what you are dealing with in terms of size and compressibility of the data. You can also get information on available space with `df -k` and on the space used by what you are trying to backup with `du -ks $DIR`.

Finally, it's possible it is working as it should and you just have too much data to fit on the tape. Break up the backups to more than one tape.

And for restore from backup should I run something like

Confirm?


Giorasta

just a quick comment that you have all your pipes running backwards. You want to pull the data off the tape, pipe the output to gzip, and then pipe that output to star.