Network backup suggestions?

[Jim Barton]

In article <13089 at cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>, ktl at wag240.caltech.edu (Kian-Tat
Lim) writes:
> 
> 	We have a 95% full 500 megabyte filesystem on our 4D/240 that
> we would (very much) like to backup regularly.  The Iris only has a
> cartridge tape drive, but another of our machines (running a fairly
> standard 4.3 BSD) has a 6250 bpi 9 track.  The two machines are
> connected by a lightly-loaded Ethernet.
> 
> 1)	The filesystem is NFS mounted on the BSD machine.  We would
> thus be able to use dump if we enabled root access to the remote
> filesystem.  Are there any additional security holes we would
> introduce by doing this?

The BSD 'dump' command actually understands the filesystem as laid out on
the disk.  I doubt that it can back up an NFS filesystem.  You probably need
to use tar if you're going to use this method.  Beware, though - NFS is
slow, expecially compared to a decent 9-track drive.

> 
> 2)	Is there a version of rdump available for the Iris (running
> 3.1F until application software catches up with the new release)?

No, there isn't.  This is mostly because 'dump' would have to be re-written
from scratch to work on the EFS filesystem rather than Berkeley's, and we
don't have extra grad students hanging around to do odd jobs like that.
Maybe someday ...

> 
> 3)	Is there any way to make bru to a pipe work properly over
> multiple tapes?  It seems that if we specify an appropriate tape
> size that bru will correctly split the archive, but the remote side of
> the pipe will have difficulty discovering this and cannot communicate
> end-of-tape messages back to bru to facilitate idiot-proofing.

BRU should support the BSD remote tape protocol.  If you specify the
remote tape device as <machine>:/dev/mt..., then it will use the /etc/rmt
daemon to do the dirty work.

> 
> 4)	Any other suggestions?

Tar over NFS seems your best bet if 'bru' doesn't work.

> 
> --
> Kian-Tat Lim (ktl at wagvax.caltech.edu, KTL @ CITCHEM.BITNET, GEnie: K.LIM1)


-- Jim Barton
   Silicon Graphics Computer Systems
   jmb at sgi.com