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Comments and suggestions concerning this book should be mailed to gmourani@videotron.ca © Copyright 1999-2000 Gerhard Mourani and Open Network Architecture ® 451 Making backups with tar With six tapes you can make backups every day, the procedure is to use tape 1 for the first full backup (Friday 1), and tapes 2 to 5 for the incremental backups (Monday through Thursday). Then you make a new full backup on tape 6 (second Friday), and start doing incremental ones with tapes 2 to 5 again. It’s important to keep tape 1 on its state until you've got a new full backup with tape 6. In the following example bellow, we assume that we write the backup to a tape SCSI drive named (/dev/st0) and we backup the home directory (/home) of our system. First of all, we must to move to the file system “/” partition. When creating an archive file, “tar” will strip leading “/” (slash) characters from file path names. This means that restore files may not end up in the same locations they were backed up from. Therefore, to solve the problem the solution is to change to the “/” root directory before make all backup or all restore. · To move to the “/” root directory, use the command: [root@deep]# cd / It is important to always start with a full backup (say, on a Friday), for example: · Friday 1, (use tape 1 for the first full backup). [root@deep /]# cd / [root@deep /]# tar cpf /dev/st0 --label=" full-backup created on `date '+%d-%B-%Y'`." \       --directory / home · Monday, (use tapes 2 for the incremental backups). [root@deep /]# cd / [root@deep /]# tar cpNf /dev/st0 --label=" full-backup created on `date '+%d-%B-%Y'`." \       --directory / home · Tuesday, (use tapes 3 for the incremental backups). [root@deep /]# cd / [root@deep /]# tar cpNf /dev/st0 --label=" full-backup created on `date '+%d-%B-%Y'`." \       --directory / home · Wednesday, (use tapes 4 for the incremental backups). [root@deep /]# cd / [root@deep /]# tar cpNf /dev/st0 --label=" full-backup created on `date '+%d-%B-%Y'`." \       --directory / home · Thursday, (use tapes 5 for the incremental backups). [root@deep /]# cd / [root@deep /]# tar cpNf /dev/st0 --label=" full-backup created on `date '+%d-%B-%Y'`." \       --directory / home · Friday 2, (use tape 6 for the new full backups). [root@deep /]# cd / [root@deep /]# tar cpf /dev/st0 --label=" full-backup created on `date '+%d-%B-%Y'`." \       --directory / home · Now, start doing incremental ones with tapes 2 to 5 again and so on. The “c” option specifies that an archive file is begin created. The “p” option preserve permissions; file protection information will be “remembered”. The “N” option done an incremental backup and only store files newer than DATE. The “f” option states that the very next argument will be the name of the archive file or device being written.