UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi

The answer to this question will probably be "How long is a piece of string?"... but i'll ask anyway... The tech who was looking after admin on the only linux box in the office is no longer here, so it falls on me to maintain it.

Apparently there's a daily backup running, but i can't find anything in /etc/cron.daily which refers to backups. The overall result/summary of the backup is supposed to be emailed to the manager, but this stopped working and wasn't fixed before the previous guy left...

Where can i look/what can i look at to determine what backups are scheduled? any help greatly appreciated.

Hi,

try to collect some additional infos, i.e.:
- look inside /var/spool/cron in order to read all the system users' crontabs;
- does the company use a centralized backup software? if yes, it may be a backup agent/client installed on the machine: look at the official documentation for that client and your specific platform;
- as root user, launch a

Code:

ps -eaf

and look at long running processes in the 'TIME' column at various times in the course of the 24 hours: it may be that the process responsible for backups shows in the output (i.e.: it may be a daemon or a script).
Tell us what you found.

see ya
fra

If you have sample email from when the backup worked, check the real source address of the email (look at the email headers with your email reader) and also look for clues in the mail body.
If you still have the server mail logs going back to when it worked, check whether the destination email address ever appeared in the mail log.
If other backups still work, look at how they are configured.

Thanks for your assistance. /var/spool/cron had a single line calling a script from another directory. In that script, the line doing all the work is:

Code:

find . -path './mnt' -prune -o -path './tmp' -prune -o -path './sys' -prune -o -path './proc' -prune -o -print | cpio -ocB >$TAPE 2>&1

TAPE is /dev/st0

Any ideas on how to verify/view the contents of the archive?

ok, it seems that the previous guy was backing up with cpio directly to a tape device.

You may find infos about the execution and outcomes of the backup with ps -eaf (and looking for the presence of commands related to 'find' or 'cpio', and looking at logs in /var/log/messages or /var/log/cron.

In order to have info about how to manage cpio tape backups, have a look at:
Solaris UNIX Tape Backup And Recovery With tar And cpio Commands
the part showing cpio usage.

tell us how you-re doing
see ya
fra