On Thu, Feb 14, 2002 at 10:54:55AM -0000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I have a 70GB disk which I don't want to devote a whole DLT to. I > really need to backup individual partitions on the disk. We are > running amanda on Solaris 7 and have been using dump to do our > backups. I believe to get round this problem I could use tar but I've > heard there can be problems with this, so what are they if there are > any?
The issues I've run into using GNU tar with amanda under Solaris: 1: atime gets touched. Most of the time you don't care, but when you really need it (usually forensics for me), atime is nice to have. 2: Estimate time can be pathologically long for some types of data. Seems to be worse for large-numbers-of-small-files sort of file systems? I never did figure it out completely, was still getting timeouts occasionally with etimeout=3600, I gave up and went to ufsdump. (I know there are some estimate hacks out there, didn't have time to pursue that...) 3: Aside from estimate time, tar is a bit slower (though not as much as you would think). 4: tar does have path-length and name-length restrictions. > Also how do I go about backing-up and restoring using tar? Aside from the excellent advice already given by Joshua, make sure amanda knows where tar is: % egrep GNUTAR config/config.h -- Jay Lessert [EMAIL PROTECTED] Accelerant Networks Inc. (voice)1.503.439.3461 Beaverton OR, USA (fax)1.503.466-9472