Backup FAQ

What is the backup policy?
Please see the policy page.

Where are the public tape drives located?

Public tape drives are located on the public workstations in room 218 and 242.

Public ACS Tape Drives

Host	Location	Model	Media	Solaris Name	IRAF Name
acs38	242	SUN Unipak Exabyte 8500	8mm(2.5GB/10GB)	/dev/rmt/0	mta
acs38	242	SUN Unipak Exabyte 8505	8mm(5GB/16GB)	/dev/rmt/1	mtb
acs38	242	SUN Unipak DAT	DDS3(12GB/24GB)	/dev/rmt/1	mtc
acs38	242	SUN Unipak DAT	DDS4(20GB/40GB)	/dev/rmt/2	mtd
hibou	218	SUN Unipak DAT	DDS3(12GB/24GB)	/dev/rmt/0	mte

How can I backup/restore data on a laptop?
To backup data from a laptop to a tape drive:
```
acsnb% tar cvfb  -  20 /home/you | ssh TAPEHOST dd of=/dev/rmt/0 obs=20b
```
Where TAPEHOST is the hostname of the system with a tape drive named /dev/rmt/0. This will make a backup of /home/you.
You may wish to use the /dev/rmt/1 tape drive.

To restore data from a tape drive to a laptop:
```
acsnb% cd restore_dir
acsnb% ssh TAPEHOST "dd if=/dev/rmt/0 ibs=20b" | tar xvfb  -  20
```
This will run "dd" on the TAPEHOST, which will read from the "if" (input file) and stream the data over the SSH link. It will then be read by tar through the pipe and restored to disk. You may want to try restoring it to an alternate location (ie. not /) so that files will not be overwritten if the process fails.
How can I burn a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM?
On your workstation or laptop running Fedora, backing On any laptop running a reasonably up-to-date version of Linux (e.g. Fedora Core), you can simply use the GUI-based CD Creation tool included with GNOME. The CD Creation tool is very easy to use, but for step-by-step instructions you may want to peruse CD/DVD Creation with Nautilus.

For laptops running ancient versions of Linux (e.g. Red Hat 9), the most reliable way to burn a CD is to use cdrecord. The following series of commands creates a temporary directory (cd_root) and copies '*.fits' to that directory for backup. Of course, you may use any directory name and back up any type of file you desire. This is provided simply for reference purposes.

% mkdir cd_root % cp *.fits cd_root % mkisofs -R -v -o cdimage.iso cd_root % isoinfo -R -l -i cdimage.iso % cdrecord -scanbus [Find CD-R device from list] % cdrecord -v dev=device cdimage.iso [where device is the device determined from -scanbus (eg. 2,0,0)