how would a make a complete backup of all files spanning all file systems on my SCO box to tape?

i read somewhere:

find . -print | cpio -ocv > /dev/rStp0

from / ... will this do it??

(yes /dev/rStp0 is my tape drive)

are you just looking to make a backup of everything or are you looking to move the system to another box?

I usually use the -depth command to make sure it gets everything.

log in
cd to /

find . -depth -print | cpio -ocBv > /dev/rStp0


If you are looking for something to keep backing up your system I would look into lonetar or backupedge. their products work great with SCO and both of the products allow you to make Rescue Disks. These are a set of floppies that you can boot from, that will access the tape drive and then allow you to restore your system to a blank disk. It will even divvy the disk back to what it was.

good luck.

I am looking just to make a full backup of everything. ALSO, how would i make rescue floppy's for my SCO system???

Its been a while but I'm pretty sure that you log in as root and type

mkdev fd

and follow the prompts from there.
These are just a root FS disk and a boot fs disk. It will not reinstall your system like the "rescue" disks of some of the commercial products out there.

but the boot disks will be enough to get in and restore from the tapes using cpio correct?? I mean cpio is all you need to lay your entire system back down the way it was right?

no. I would not trust CPIO to restore a system. It does not do well with named pipes, special and device files. It will also not partition a new harddrive. CPIO is good for file restores. The root and boot disks just give you access to the harddrive if you forget the root password or you have to do some maintenance and cannot boot the system from the hard drive.

If all you have are cpio backups and you have to replace your hard drive and restore your system you will have to install SCO fully and then restore the CPIO tape. This usually works but there can be some issues afterwards but nothing that cannot be fixed. I've had to do this a few times although I only have 2 customers running SCO and don't do as much as i used to with it.

If you are responsible for a SCO system and its a production system with important data on it I would HIGHLY recommend looking into the two products that I mentioned. There might be others out there but I have personally worked with and still use the ones mentioned. Those products use a modified version of tar that does backup links, named pipes, special and device files. they create their own "rescue disks" that are much different from the SCO root and boot. These disks will partition the drive to what it was when they were created. install the tape drive that was present when they were created and look for a "Master" backup tape and restores the entire system from that tape.
The "Master" backup is a type of backup that you set in the software on what type of backup to run. You can also do incremental backups.


I had a system go down about 6 mos ago with a bad hardrive. They used Backup edge and did Master backups every night. These are the steps I followed.

1) had onsite tech replace drive
2) had onsite tech insert rescue disk 1
3) had the tech insert rescue disk 2 when prompted
4) had tech insert previous nights backup tape
5) waited two hours and the system was restored. Completely.

Its well worth the cost of the software. As with any backup plan you need to make sure your backups are good and keep your rescue disks current if you change hardware. For what its worth both products work great but I've gotten better support from Backup Edge tech support.

OK, i used the command you provided:
to backup my server. Now how do i extract just one directory on the archive?? I want to specify a source directory and a target directory.