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Intro to System Administration Back-ups and Restores |
Back-ups and Restores Doing back-ups and restores is probably a system administrator's most hated job. Users constantly delete their files and need them restored ASAP and there is always the occasional disk or power crash. These two reasons by themselves should be enough warning to keep backups. Before getting to commands let me talk about accessing a tape drive under Solaris. Solaris looks at a tape drive as a rewinding (/dev/rmt/0) or non-rewinding drive (/dev/rmt/0n). The SCSI id should be 4, but doesn't have to be. There are many ways to do back-ups with UNIX. Some good commands to learn are tar, cpio, dd, pax, and mt. All of these have their cool features, but I prefer to use ufsdump and ufsrestore. They allow you to specify tape and tape density etc. Basically, you want pass it the level dump you want 0-9 (0 being a full dump 9 being an incremental), it has a file /etc/dumpdates that is helpful when looking for the tape you need data from. To update this use the flag "u", finally you want to tell it to dump the files with the "f" flag. Finally, give it the tape device and the file or directory names. For example to do a full dump of /var/spool/mail. ufsdump 0uf /dev/rmt/0 /var/spool/mail ufsrestore works the same way as ufsdump. Remember that ufsrestore can only restore tapes created by ufsdump.
Windows NT comes with a GUI interface for doing back-ups. The Backup Utility is located in the Administrative Tools Group. This is probably the easiest back-up GUI to use simply highlight the disks you want backed up and click the back-up button. It brings up a box asking you for the tape name and what type of back-up you would like differential, incremental, copy, normal, or daily. The software will also generate a log file of what was backed up and when. You can turn this on or off. My opinion is to keep it on. Users always think that the computer ate their files, so the less time you spend searching for the files the better. Phillip J.Yurko |