Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.alpha, comp.os.linux.misc
Date: 1999/11/17

> What backup utility program do you use?  Is BRU free to use in academic

You can do incremental backups with tar. Here is my tar script for backing up everything which changed since the last backup. In my case, I do it to a zipdisk, but you could modify this to do it to a tape. You would have to store the date of the last incremental backup somewhere; I do it on the zipdisk. You would also have to use mt commands to position yourself on the tape. And I would strongly recommend using the eof option of mt to add an EOF after each record. Then you can use mt fsf skipping twice for each record to position the tape.

mount /zipdos
DAY=`date +%j-%H-%M` #day of the year-hour-min
FILE=/zipdos/incr_"$DAY".tgz
cd /
DIRS="./home ./etc ./boot ./root ./usr/local ./var"
/bin/tar --exclude cache --exclude opt --exclude magma -czlf $FILE -N \
"`cat /zipdos/tar.date`"  $DIRS
date > /zipdos/tar.date
du -s /zipdos
umount /zipdos

Leonard Evens

> requirements include
>
>1) should do "incremental",  ("tar" cannot)

-G, --incremental          handle old GNU-format incremental backup
-g, --listed-incremental=FILE
                           handle new GNU-format incremental backup

>2) should do it under cron ("taper" cannot) for incremental.

>3) should do multi-volume in the forground  for full (rhbackup cannot)

>4) it would be nice if it can do compression (dump cannot)