Re: Revision to dump (8)

[Matt Simonsen <matt@careercast.com>]

On Tue, 2002-06-25 at 15:06, Ben Goren wrote:
> On Tue,  Jun 25,  2002 at  08:30:38PM +0000,  Christian Weisgerber
> wrote:
> 
> > Ben Goren <ben@trumpetpower.com> wrote:
> >
> > > +If writing  to an ordinary  file on  a remote host,  the file
> > > must already exist.
> >
> > You are not supposed to do  this.  This is for writing to remote
> > tape drives, not regular files, cf. rmt(8).
> 
> Er...then perhaps I should take a few steps back and describe what
> I'm trying to accomplish.
> 
> I  want  to use  dump/restore  for  backups  for  a network  of  a
> half-dozen computers. There  is no  tape drive available,  but one
> computer has a CD burner and a lot of free hard disk space. Buying
> a tape drive is not an option for financial reasons.
> 
I missed the first thread, but would this will work for what you want?
It'll work with GNU tar, at least... a similar command should work for
cpio or dump, too.

tar -czf - | ssh $server "cat - | dd of=/backup/fileXXX.tar.gz bs=10k"

The cool thing about this is you are using the client CPU for
compression before the data is sent across the network or wrote to the
backup disk. Since the backup box only has to write a fraction of the
data to disk and the clients can only compress it so fast parallel
backups are possible.

Matt