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Figure 64.1. The first page of command line help from Lone-Tar.
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by Tim Parker
As you saw in Chapter 32, “System Administration Basics,” making backups on your Linux system can be a complex and often annoying procedure, especially if you don’t have a high-capacity tape drive or other backup storage device available. If you have to rely on floppies for a backup, you are really in for a frustrating time, as a full backup can take dozens (if not hundreds) of disks. When floppies are all that’s available, most users don’t even bother.
Many users find the normal backup tar utility difficult and unfriendly to work with. On top of that, tar can error out for any number of conditions, causing you to have to restart your backup from the very beginning. In many larger UNIX environments, the use of tar has been replaced by custom-designed GUI-driven backup utilities, but Linux hasn’t quite caught up to that point yet. However, there are a few alternatives to using straight-forward tar, and the best is Lone Star Software’s Lone-Tar.
Lone-Tar can best be thought of as a super version of tar. It provides all the features of tar, yet adds some functionality that tar lacks. To be very safe, Lone-Tar does not use the standard tar utility, although it’s behavior is similar. Lone-Tar is available for a wide variety of UNIX and non-UNIX platforms, and is compatible across them all. You could, for example, use a DOS version of Lone-Tar to back up files to a tape, and then read them into your Linux system.
Like tar, Lone-Tar can back up and restore entire filesystems to and from disks, tape, auxiliary hard disks, and other storage media. Lone-Tar goes beyond normal tar in that all special files, links (symbolic and otherwise), virtual files, and partitions can be handled as easily as standard files.
Lone-Tar can also allow backups and restores of dual drives with different capacities, which tar is not capable of doing easily. Most importantly, Lone-Tar has an excellent error recovery procedure built in that allows recovery of a filesystem or files on a backup medium, even when that medium has developed errors. When tar encounters problems with a backup medium, it terminates, effectively ruining the value of that backup set.
Tip:
Lone-Tar sounds pretty handy so far, doesn’t it? Lone-Tar is a commercial product, and Lone Star Software expects to be paid for Lone-Tar, but you can use a free version distributed on several FTP sites for a limited time to try it out. After the trial period you can purchase a license for Lone-Tar if you find it valuable and useful. Along with the commercial version, you’ll also get a well-written manual. For more information on Lone-Tar, contact Lone Star Software at
- 13987 W. Annapolis Ct.
- Mt. Airy, MD 21765
- (800) LONE-TAR
cowboy@cactus.com http://www.cactus.com ftp.cactus.com
Lone-Tar has two interfaces: command-line and menu-driven. The command-line interface is very similar to the tar command’s syntax for compatibility’s sake. This way, someone who has been using tar for many years and moves to Lone-Tar for the extra capabilities it offers doesn’t have to relearn a whole new command set. As you may have discovered by now, tar’s command set is rather uninspiring, awkward, and difficult to master.
It takes years to feel comfortable with tar’s command line, so Lone Star Software designed a friendlier menu-driven interface, too. You can use either the command-line or the menu-driven interface to perform all Lone-Tar’s functions, and they work the same. The menu-driven interface is much easier to work with, though, especially if you haven’t mastered tar.
You can see the difference between the two interface methods by a quick look at the syntax of Lone-Tar. The syntax, very similar to tar’s syntax, looks like this:
lone-tar [MIcCrtTUxPZ] [bdefhklmnpvFEADVR] [tapefile] [block size] [compression limit] [0-9] [floppy/tape size] files …
If you are not exactly right with one of the command-line parameters, both tar and Lone-Tar will give you pages of error codes and options, as shown in Figure 64.1. You can display this command-line help screen at any time by simply typing this command at the command line:
Figure 64.1. The first page of command line help from Lone-Tar.
lone-tar
The menu-driven interface, on the other hand, is shown in Figure 64.2 and is much more friendly and easier to figure out. Each of the primary menu options leads to another menu, with mnemonic startup commands for each choice.
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Figure 64.2. The menu-drive interface from Lone-Tar is much easier and friendlier to use than the command line.
The choice of interface you use is entirely up to you, of course, but if you are not familiar with tar’s awkward syntax, you should stick to the menu-driven interface. UNIX veterans may want to stay with the command line interface, but the menu-driven system is much easier to work with and eliminates the chance of typing errors. For most of this chapter, we’ll work with the menu-driven interface.
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