system backup failures

[Jude DaShiell]

I've been using tar to do multiple disk backups and interestingly the
reason for the backup failures I'm experiencing isn't due to software but
rather to hardware.  As near as I can tell, the iomega parallel 250mb zip
drive which is an external drive overheats after 11 volumes have been
backed up.  About the only improvement I'd make in the following scripts
would be to put a beep into the endback script for time when volume
changes needed to be made and possibly have a maximum number of disks the
script would backup set perhaps to 5 before ending operations to allow the
zip drive to cool down.  The problem with this approach is I'm not sure
how to resume backup with say disk 6 or disk 11 and not overwrite already
existing archives and have tar all right with that yet.  If there's a way
to do that I'll probably move the mformat command out to its own script so
I can quickly format multiple zip disks separately from the backup
process.

#!/bin/sh
# system backup script
# uses tar to do a system backup to zip disks in /dev/sda4
# script uses:
# endback script handles full disk processing
# pasback file has directory and file patterns to exclude from backup
# other resources used:
# mtools mformat program used by endback script to erase zip disks
# eject to eject zip disk used by endback script
# mount and umount programs used by sysback and endback scripts
echo "put a zip disk in drive for system backup"
read
mount -t vfat /dev/sda4 /zip
tar cpP -V=system_backup_taken_$(date +%y%m%d) --new-volume-script=/root/endback --exclude-from=/root/pasback --dereference --directory=/ --file=/zip/b$(date +%y%m%d)s.tar /
umount /zip

#!/bin/sh
# endback script used by sysback script
# this script erases all files on zip disk before returning to tar
echo "ejecting zip disk presss enter when ready"
read
ODISK=1
while [ $ODISK -eq 1 ]; do
eject -s /dev/sda4
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
ODISK=0
fi
done
echo "put another disk in zip drive then press enter when ready"
read
mformat z:
NDISK=1
while [ $NDISK -eq 1 ]; do
mount -t vfat /dev/sda4 /zip
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
NDISK=0
fi
done


/tmp/
/proc/
/var/
/dev/
-- 
Jude <dashielljt(at)gmpexpress-dot-net>