Hi all, I'm just looking at using smbtar to backup the Win95 PC's on my network, and would like usability ideas please. The tape drive I intend to use is in our RS6000 and has a capacity of 20GB before compression which means that I will be able to fit plenty of PC's onto one tape as all the PC's have <3GB HD's on them. The problem I have is how do I get multiple tar's onto one tape? I could tar them all to disk, and then put them all onto tape as one big tar file but then I would need 20+GB of disk space which would be expensive and wasteful. The tapes are ?50 each, so I don't want to do 1PC -> 1 tape (also unattended backups would be impossible). If possible I would like the backup of the PC's to be tagged onto the end of the backup of the RS. Has anyone got any ideas? Thanks, Gary
The machine that I am using is an IBM RS6000 running AIX 4.2 - Does anyone know the device names that I need to use? I am currently working on a script to obtain the list of currently available PC from the browsemaster, which will then be used to drive the multiple tar's. If anyone already has such a thing that they are proud of then I would love a copy to use / copy / pass off as my own ;-) Gary -----Original Message----- From: Nick Parker [SMTP:npar@Berger-Levrault.fr] Sent: 11 September 1998 10:39 To: gary.stainburn@ringways.co.uk Subject: Re: smbtar multiple machines Gary, usually on unix, when you specify the backup device, you specify whether you want a rewind or not. For example Sunos tape with rewind: /dev/rst0 Sunos tape without rewind: /dev/nrst0 Solaris tape with rewind: /dev/mt/0 Solaris tape without rewind: /dev/mt/0n It's probably just a question of finding the right name for the backup device and then using the commands in the right sequence to make sure you only rewind when you want to. Example: mt -f /dev/nrst0 rew tar -f /dev/nrst0 etc tar -f /dev/nrst0 etc mt -f /dev/nrst0 rew Nick Parker Berger-Levrault, France