Hi Folks,

Every night I backup a whole load of files to an external tape drive. It took me a while but I came up with this which seems to work:

tar -cvz -b 16384 -X /tmp/excludefile -f /dev/nst0 /var/backup/ > /var/log/backup/tapebackup/backup-`date +%Y%m%d`.log 2>/var/log/backup/tapebackup/backup-`date +%Y%m%d`.log

Anyways, its been about 2 weeks since I've done this and I want to run a test restore.

So I rewind the tape.

And then for example: (a file picked at random)

tar -tv -b 16384 -f /dev/nst0 /var/backup/edwtserv16/arcdata/EPOSD11/import/enable_consts.sql

I know this file exists because I got it from the logs.

Then it returns this for about 20 minutes whilst the tape whirls around in use:
tar: This does not look like a tar archive
tar: Skipping to next header
tar: Archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers

Then I get this:
tar: /var/backup/edwtserv16/arcdata/EPOSD11/import/enable_consts.sql: Not found in archive
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors



So am I doing something stupid? I dont like the "This does not look like a tar archive" Why is it saying that when it is being created as a tar archive?

Any ideas?

Thanks

Bryan

Your logs method look pretty enough but I don't see anything that looks like a name for the actual tar file.

Here's my example. I'm using the current date as the filename with an extension of tar.gz. Now that is going to another hard drive so I gunzip it ( gz ) but since you are saving to a tape, you shouldn't need the gz.

#!/bin/bash
filename=`date '+%m%d%y'`
tar -cvzf /mnt/backup/${filename}.tar.gz /home
#Delete old files with the following command
find /mnt/backup -type f -name '*.gz' -mtime +90 -exec rm {} \;