Quick 'n' dirty backup of a system

[Alexander Holst]

Hi,

just two questions:

1]
Which would be the best, most simple and easiest method to backup a
freshly installed and configured system to tape: tar or dump (or maybe
something I haven't heared of as of yet)?

My goal is to get an image of a completely installed and custom
configured system on tape, so I can restore it very quickly, preferably
by booting from the YDL install CD (so I have all means of easily
partitioning and formatting new disks).

The system in question does not see a lot of incremental stuff to be
backed up at all (except for the log files, which would be affordable to
loose) - all I need is an initial image of the system.

Is tar or restore available from a shell when booted off the install CD?
I would like to be able to just boot (whatever CD), insert the tape and
issue some commandline stuff and have my system back online.

The system I am talking about is a custom YDL 3.0 installation on an ANS
700/200 being used as an AppleTalk / IP router and print spooler for our
design department here - so basically if it goes down it needs to be
back online as quickly as possible ;) In case I shouldn't be available,
someone else should be able to simply follow a few well documented steps
and get the system back to its initial state in order to avoid time
consuming point of failure detection, as well as enabling a person
without indepth knowledge of Linux/YDL to restore the machine.


2]
I did some testing today: is it possible that the HP DAT drive that came
on the ANSes only performs at ~353KB/sec (that's ~20MB/min) when writing
to it, although the SCSI bus is a fast SCSI bus, set to at least
10MB/sec? 353KB/sec is the number dump spit out after a test dump.
Considering the the time it took and the amount of data written to tape,
the quoted number seems to be accurate.

Any ideas, help or info appreciated!

Alex


-- 
Alexander Holst
Hergulesse Design
ph: +49 [0]711 887 5195
fx: +49 [0]711 887 5196
<alex.holst@hergulesse.de>
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