Hi all,

I 've currently been working on Oracle8i on Suse Linux7.3 server. Just wanted to back up the database into a tape, which is available on server machine. However, I don't know how to access to it. Please show me how or where I should start to activate the tape drive.
Thanks in advance.

Lenka.

Well...

Making many assumptions, the simplest way is to use tar:

tar cvf /dev/st0 [databasepath]

This assumes your DAT is on st0.

Hope this gives you a dir to head in.

Bob

Thanks for your quick response, Bob. I do appreciate it. However, I think I did not make myself clear enough about my problem. I don't know where and how to start to access to the tape drive on the Suse Linux 7.3 server in order to back up my database into it. Please help.

Thanks in advance.

Lenka.

One of the easiest programs to use in making backups is Taper.
If you have used Backup Exec for Netware it is "somewhat" similar - (Not much really,but; enough to get the "gist") You will have to start it from a terminal (console) window with a command set of instructions. (Do a man taper to get a list of it's command set). What you need to remember is that to access your tape drive, you while need to specify the type of I/O interface (floppy, SCSI, IDE) such as -

taper -T s

The "s" is for SCSI. Again the the list of tape type options can be pulled up by doing "man taper". And if you can't stand man pages,try out

http://taper.e-survey.net.au/taper.html

Good Luck

Note: If you do use taper in the unattended mode with cron and get a message like this

"No such file or directory . . ."

the problem is with the cron's home path. Either, reset your file paths in taper to match cron's home path or changes cron's home path to match the info path in taper's. preference file.