[PLUG] How to TAR a disk to SCSI tape?

[Rupert Heesom <raheesom@navpoint.com>]

All at PLUG:

I'm fairly new at Linux, I have it loaded as the primary OS on my
PC.   I have a SCSI tape drive which I want to use to back Linux up
to.    Now the best way to do this I'm told is using the TAR util, but I
can't seem to get it to create an archive on tape.....on disk yes, but
not tape!

The documentation I've read says either that TAR backs up to tape by
default, or that I can specify tape using a command like "tar -cvf
/dev/tape /" to archive the whole disk to tape.   The only thing that
this command did for me was to create an archive on disk called
"/dev/tape" and back the whole disk to that archive!!   When I've used
commands like "tar -cvf /dev/st0 /", tar has given an error, so the
command didn't even try to work.

Can someone give me some pointers as to how I should be able to access
the tape drive?

regs
rupert heesom


______________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group       -      http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements-http://lists.phillylinux.org/mail/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion  -  http://lists.phillylinux.org/mail/listinfo/plug