Hello all, i'm very much a newbie, so I appreciate any help that anyone can lend. I'm running White Box Linux with a SCSI tape drive. Via webmin, if I try to do a file system backup, I get this error:

Performing backup of /home/VF FILES to /dev/nst0 ..


DUMP: Date of this level 0 dump: Wed Jul 7 09:39:50 2004
DUMP: Dumping /dev/sda2 (/ (dir home/VF FILES)) to /dev/nst0
DUMP: Added inode 8 to exclude list (journal inode)
DUMP: Added inode 7 to exclude list (resize inode)
DUMP: Label: tape1
DUMP: Compressing output at compression level 1 (bzlib)
DUMP: mapping (Pass I) [regular files]
DUMP: mapping (Pass II) [directories]
DUMP: estimated 15062933 tape blocks.
DUMP: Volume 1 started with block 1 at: Wed Jul 7 09:39:52 2004
DUMP: write error 30 blocks into volume 1: Invalid argument
DUMP: fopen on /dev/tty fails: No such device or address
DUMP: The ENTIRE dump is aborted.

.. backup failed!

I know that the tape drive works, and that Linux is communicating with the device, because whenever these commands are run it seems to advance and then rewind right away. When I try to rewind the tape I get this:

> /dev/nst0 -rewind
sh: line 1: /dev/nst0: Permission denied

So i'm wondering where to start. Any help would be very appreciated. Thanks!

It looks like you might be failing while attempting to copy your device files. If your webmin tool has the capability of excluding directories from the backup, try excluding /dev.

You should also consider a simple tar backup, which will give you the advantage of maximum data portability.

For a full disaster recovery tool that can use your tape drive for the data dump, take a look at Mondo Rescue http://www.microwerks.net/~hugo/