Unix expert required - mounting tape drives and backup of images onto tapes

ChrisD.

ChrisD.

ChrisD.

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20 Sep 2006
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We have two UNIX servers (No GUI installed) here which run VM Ware on each. We have images of our entire live network stored on these and they are used to do application testing prior to releasing on the live network.

We have some 2TB's (probably more) worth of images and to lose all of this would be a disaster as we'd have to rebuild it all. This has already happened once and we had a few weeks of hard graft in order to rebuild them.

What we are trying to do is create an effective backup solution. We've already tried to create a folder share and point a Win 2003 box on the same domain to it in order to simply dump the image files onto a tape however it turns out that NFS share isn't installed on the boxes.

Each server has it's own tape drive and we have an abundance of 400GB tapes that we want to use for the backup process.

We've managed to mount the tape drive on one of the servers but the other comes up with a superblock error. :?

How can we copy the images from the local and SAN storage of the servers to a tape drive? None of the images are anywhere near 400GB so we'd be looking at putting a few on each tape.

We already tried putting them all into a .tar file but when we extract it the images no longer boot in VM Ware.

Worst thing is that we don't know what the actual file system is on UNIX and as such we're having to guess a lot of the commands that google is giving us. :lol:

Any ideas/hints/tips from anyone on here who might know how tro use UNIX?
 
To access the 2003 world you're going to need to use Samba, unless you've got Windows UNIX tools installed off the CD (IIRC!).

What *nix are you using out of interest? (do a "uname -a" at the prompt)
 
randal24 said:
To access the 2003 world you're going to need to use Samba, unless you've got Windows UNIX tools installed off the CD (IIRC!).

What *nix are you using out of interest? (do a "uname -a" at the prompt)
Click to expand...

If we can dump it straight onto tape via the UNIX prompt then that would be ideal. I don't think that we can point a 2K3 box to it as UNIX doesn't have NFS share installed.

In responce to your question, it gave a load of gumf that I don't understand (or want to lol) but does GNU/UNIX mean anything to you? It was part of the responce.
 
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