in need of some direction on a failed tape drive please....

[alienated1]

heya everyone ^^)
i run a small windows network {4 servers, 2 Domain Controllers and 20 or so workstations.} and 1 SCO Unix server running some old finance software. we need this old server for a few more months then it is getting retired.
my problem, the tape backup unit failed and a functional backup cannnot be found.
i know virtually nothing about SCO Unix and need some direction on what i should do to get 2 more backups, 1 ASAP and one in 3 months or so.
perhaphs imaging the entire operating system with ghost or some utility that works with unix?
anyway, thanks in advance....
AJ

 

[edfair]

Depends on what you have. With root access you could give us the OS and the hardware.
uname -X will give OS.
tail -50 /usr/adm/messages | more will give a couple of pages of hardware. These for server, not sure about unixware.

Usual thing is to replace the broken part and expect it to backup again. But that may be expecting too much if it is an older system as backup systems have progressed faster than the unix and the old stuff is harder and harder to find.

The systems I've supported went from Wangtek 60mb to Wangtek 525mb until the sources dried up, then to Yamaha CD burners. All SCSI. But in addition to the burning daily I also recently put a backup hard drives in the boxes. That is primary backup and the burned stuff is a secondary backup.

If you are dealing with SCSI you can probably add an external hard drive to act as backup.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[chipk]

I would get ahold of Windows Services for UNIX, set up one of my Windows servers as an NFS server, perform NFS mount from Unix system and backup (were you using tar?) to that mount. I did something similar when migrating data from AIX Informix to Windows/SQL. Worked like a champ.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/interopmigration/unix/sfu/default.mspx

 

[motoslide]

If your SCO system includes VisionFS or Samba, you could share the parent directory of the Financial program and grab that data from one of the Windows boxes. Or create a tarfile and auto-ftp that to a Windows box running FTP Services.
These are options in addition to those noted above, which are certainly great ideas.
It doesn't sound like you ever plan to restore onto another SCO box, so you are probably most concerned with the Financial data rather than a complete backup including O/S configuration files, login ID's, etc.

"Proof that there is intelligent life in Oregon. Well, Life anyway.