If you have compressible data you may save space on you tapes by using compression; this comes at a cost of CPU cycles to do the compressing, which can often be a worthwhile tradeoff for a long-term backup. To do this is quite simple – add in the -z switch to your tar command.…
Following on from the article on writing files to a tape backup, what happens if you want to back up more than what fits on a single tape? Here we want to use the –multi-volume switch, or -M. Use it so: tar -cvMf /dev/[path-to-tape] [backup folder or files] As a working example:…
A customer upgraded from 13.04 to 13.10 and their internal wiki was broken afterwards; for a simple Apache install where the wiki was installed at the web root and all access was via the LAN (thus they were happy with not restricting the access), the fix was to add: <Location /> Require all…
UPDATE: This information is now out of date, see new post here. One very handy ZFS-related command which has been missing from the standard ZFS on Linux implementation has been arcstat.py. This script provides a great deal of useful information about how effective your adaptive read cache (ARC) is. ZFSoL 0.6.2 includes it,…
On the 20th July (US time) the Ubuntu forums were hacked and local usernames, email addresses and passwords were taken. The passwords aren’t in plaintext but regardless, change yours if you are/were a user!
To check the version of Samba that you are running, use the smbstatus command. The first line is the version, which should look something like: Samba version 3.6.3 If you want to see just the version without the rest of the smbstatus information, you can run: smbstatus –version Much less…
If you’re looking to make a copy of a user’s crontab as a backup or just to view it without using the crontab editor, you can locate it at: /var/spool/cron/crontabs Each user’s crontab will be in this directory in a file named as their username (e.g. root). If you’re working with a…
This is just like extracting a regular tar archive: tar -xvf /dev/[path to tape] [directory or file to restore] e.g.: tar -xvf /dev/st0 backups This will restore the “backups” file/folder to the current working directory. To check your current directory, you can use: pwd to make sure that…
To check the contents of a tape, insert the tape and run the following: tar -tf /dev/[path to tape device] e.g.: tar -tf /dev/st0 Note that typically it’s a zero, not a letter o, at the end.
To put files onto a tape, run the following: tar -cvf /dev/[path to tape] [file or directory] [file or directory] [file or directory] An example would be: tar -cvf /dev/st0 /home/bob This will back up the user bob’s home directory to the tape, here located at /dev/st0 (a typical location…
