At 09:23 25/04/01 +0100, Kevin McDermott wrote:
>[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>> I have managed to acquire an IDE tape drive. I can load th etape drive
>Controlling Tape Drives...first off try mt -f /dev/tape status
>
>mt is the Magnetic Tape controller
>
I thot mt liked to talk to SCSI tapes, and /dev/tape was usually
implemented as a link to /dev/st?. Of course a lot of programs will work
with any sort of block device & so should work with the IDE device.
The Hardware HOWTO says:
ATAPI tape drives For these an alpha driver (ide-tape.c) is available in
the kernel. ATAPI tape drives supported are
Seagate TapeStor 8000
Conner CTMA 4000 IDE ATAPI Streaming tape drive
A quick look at my 2.0.36 kernel docs shows ide tape device is
/dev/ht0....htn with automatic rewind on close. (i.e. use this for tar, dd,
cpio, dump etc)
mt is a useful tool. I'd suggest some careful experimentation though - the
original version used ioctls for basic tape manipulation (go forward N
blocks, write this, rewind...) but direct SCSI commands for the clever
stuff (which may or may not work on ide-tape).
I use the Gnu version of tar for my backups - its not terribly
sophisticated in the reporting department but doesn't suffer from the same
problems as the old Unix tar (tape overruns & no comprehension of holes in
files being top of my list). Unfortunately the documentation is really crap.
What do you want to acheive with your backups - moving data offline?
Ability to restore data to your current box in the event of a failure?
Ability to restore to another machine on failure? Transfer data to other
machines?
- this will affect your choice of backup tool.
>Amanda - Great for unattended backups (what we use)
hmm. must have a look.
Colin
--------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.lug.org.uk http://www.linuxportal.co.uk
http://www.linuxjob.co.uk http://www.linuxshop.co.uk
--------------------------------------------------------------------
