Re: tar and the braindead man

[servis@purdue.edu]

*- Anthony Landreneau wrote about "tar and the braindead man"
| Greetings,
| 	Got what I thought was a simple problem. I have a 2GB DAT tape drive, a
| directory that I want to backup to that tape drive.  Seems simple enough,
| but I can't seem to get it to work. I thought the command was:
| tar -cvf thetarfile.tar /usr/thedirectory
| 
| But it isn't working.  Now I have created a tar file on the hard drive, and
| thought it would be just as easy to move the file to tape, but I can't
| figure that out either.  Tried mounting the tape drive and the machine
| mocks me openly.  Any and all help would be apprciated!
| 
| Anthony.
| 
| 

You can't mount a tape. You need to write directly to the tape.
Otherwise how could you do a full backup of your largest partition if
it was over 50% full?

Do this instead:

tar -cvf /dev/st0 /usr/thedirectory  

where /dev/st0 is the device file for your tape.  Assuming your tape is
a scsi one(since it is a dat this is most likely true), you have scsi
tape support for the kernel and it is your only or first one found by
the kernel then the above device is correct.

-- 
Brian 
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Mechanical Engineering                              servis@purdue.edu
Purdue University                   http://www.ecn.purdue.edu/~servis
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