Several issues I have to deal with and am linux green.

Just installed a DAT 20/40 SCSI tape drive:

Running backups with TAR for some reason I error out stating that there is no more room on the tape. I am only backing up about 18gb and I get the error at about the 12gb point. I am using 150m tapes. I dont know if something else need to be set for drive or tape parameters but I dont see a switch to address it.

I cant get KDat to work it for some reason wont recognize that there is a drive at /dev/st0 although that is what I use when taring which is what KDat is set to use(I also set in pref /dev/st0 to no avail).

I tried the backup app Taper, it seems to work but for some reason is extreamly slow and I have aborted as a result.


What I need is an application that works. I know all the guru's joke about thats what TAR is for but I really dont care what I use so long as it gets the job done. I would perfer something that can be easily scheduled and easily recovered from on a file selection basis. Oh yea it need to be free too! =) Thank you all in advance for your words of wisdom!

Should I have posted this somewhere else?

Try setting up or using dump or amanda even, if this is just a single tape drive to perform backups.

Taper will not work. It was designed when tapes were 2 gigs. I don't hink it's been updated recently, though it was a nice and easy program. I could be wrong, but isn't a 150 meter tape DDS-3? That would be 10-20 gigs. By default, the tape will not be compressing anything, which means the lower number is the most likely amount to be stored. If you feel comfortable with tar, you can always first pipe the results to a compression utility, such as gzip, and then send it to the tape drive.

Ok how would I pipe gzip into it?

Will this work? ExampleI cant try at the moment)

I really dont know how to combine the two.

Oh btw the tapes are DDS4 150m 20/40

Thanx...

Gzip, as you have guessed uses the 'z' (lower case 'z' without quotes) flag. Your syntax looks fine. You can also use bzip2 instead by using an 'I' (capital 'I' without quotes). Slackware uses a different flag for bzip2, possibly -y. Sorry about my comment about the dds-3 vs dds-4 length of tape.

Thanx for the help apolinsky. As for the tapes I dont know what the deal is, I had to look again myself. From everything I do know it should have held close to 20gb of uncompressed data. Oh well hopefully I have more luck getting what I need backedup with compression.

I don't know if you are aware that tar can span tapes if you use the 'M' (multi volume) option. If you decide to look beyond a mere 'tar' I would suggest you take a look at bacula. It is a network based complete backup system similar to commercial products. it can be used to backup and restore linux, windows, and bsd machines with tape spanning and database storage of what is on the tapes (mysql postgresql or a simplified dbms.) I have used it for many years, after I gave up with amanda which could not span tapes, at least when I tried it.