Believe it or not, we have been struggling for almost four years to get our tape drive to work. We originally had an FC-20 with a 768 meg native 3020 Colorado tape drive. By the time the kernel and ftape had caught up to our model, we had replaced it with an Iomega Ditto Max […]

Tar is quite useful for copying directory trees, and is much more powerful than cp. To copy directory /home/myhome/myimportantfiles to /share/myhome/myimportantfiles: cd /home/myhome/myimportantfiles tar -cvf – . | tar -C /share/myhome/myimportantfiles/ -xv To schedule this to happen every day at 1am: crontab -e vi will run. If you are unfamiliar with vi, push ‘i’ to […]

We have a share available via NFS called share. All of our software, documents, versions of websites are on this share. It doesn’t contain any live systems stuff, but it is quite large. We bought a 15/30 gig DLT drive for cheap on Ebay, and some used DLT tapes to go with it. Many of […]

[Updated 8/27/02] SYSLINUX is a bootloader for Linux using MS-DOS floppies. It is good to learn how to create your own SYSLINUX recovery diskettes for disaster recovery. [On a related topic, check out SuperRescue CD. SuperRescue is an iso image you can burn to a CD. The CD is bootable and has a suite of […]

If you want to back up a bunch of files over a network (or locally), one approach is to go into the directory you want to back up, and execute: tar cvpf – . | tar xpv -C /share/backupetc092901 This will save permissions, as well as grab hidden files, dates, symbolic links, /dev stuff, etc. […]

One method to move filesystems around, particularly if you are moving your root filesystem, is to use dump. Dump is a lower level backup program than tar, but this also makes dump quicker, because it doesn’t have all of the overhead. Another advantage is that depth of directories, symlinks, etc. aren’t a big deal. In […]

Famiarize yourself with TestDisk. It will run on many platforms, and supports many different kinds of partitions. We were able to compile the source on two different machines (GNU/Linux and Mac OS X Tiger). One problem with compiling on Mac OS X is that the ext2 libraries are not available. This was, of course, not […]

One handy tool for booting linux systems and mounting the root partition is Loadlin. Now, Loadlin is *really* old, but there have been many times it has saved our sorry arses. You can get loadlin here. Loadlin needs some kind of *DOS on the floppy to boot from. MS-DOS 6.22 works fine; however, if you […]

One of our systems has a DLT drive we use for backup. It isn’t in a library, and we just use regular tar to back up our main share. Here are some pointers on restoring from tape with tar. First off, you need to specify the exact path from the perspective of the tar archive. […]

In this article we showed how to use rsync to mirror a website. Well, rsync can also be used to provide a lukewarm recovery system. On this workstation, the root filesystem is on /dev/hda3, and we will mirror it to /dev/sda3, which we have mounted on /mnt. If you don’t have rsync, grab rsync from […]

The combination of find and wc is perfect for doing a quick verification of the integrity of the transfer. It doesn’t verify the content of the files; however, it is quick. Run this command in the root of the source and destination directories: find . | wc 9052 9052 256270 The first column of the […]

By default, rsync will start the sync of a particular file over again if the connection is lost. Use the –inplace option if the sync is getting hung up on a large file: rsync -e ‘ssh -p sshport’ -av –inplace /source/ root@example.com:/dest/ Since the problem file is compressed, it does no good to use -avz, […]

Try this: find . -type f -size +90M -exec ls -l -h {} \;