writing to tapes

[Mark Szidik]

On Thu, 3 Jan 2002, Jason D. Justman wrote:

> speaking of which, does anyone know of a good application which will
> support incremental backups?  taper says it supports it, but for some
> reason says it limits the archives to 2gig.


I use dump/restore. (tar too) It can handle 9 levels of
incremental backups.  I only use two levels, a level 0 (full
backup) and then a higher level (2) for an incremental.

0 full backup
1 all files changes since the last lower level
2 all files changes since the last lower level
3 all files changes since the last lower level
etc...

I believe that dump works best on idle file systems.  If a
filesystem is actively writing then dump will miss this stuff.
Ben has mentioned in the past that Linus does not like dump's
method of backup, so be careful.

I really like the restore programs interactive function.  It is
very easy to retrive single files/directories from a dumped file
system.


-Mark