hello hope all of you are fine basically i want to backup the file and directories without having tape drive can i take backup on my hard disk or to another computer hoping for positive response

Hi there Jimmy, You can go about doing this in quite a number of ways. Localy: you can tar your drive/files/whatever to any. e.g as root, at root prompt mkdir /test tar cvf /test/mybackup.tar /etc This backups your /etc to directory name test in a tar ball mybackup. If you wanna compress it to reduce space, go to that directory cd /test gzip mybackup.tar FYI, i prefer using gnu tar, it's a lot nicer. get it at http://sunfreeware.com. Look for which platform your're on sparc ot intel Remotely. I assume you have a network and you own the network. One methood is you can use nfs. Suppose you have 2 computer. you want to backup some drive in A to some drive in B. What you can do is nfs mount from A to B. In B, just tar it to another place. another way is using samba. What is samba? read it here www.samba.org. you can also get a pkg of samba off sunfreeware.com. USing samba, you can share the drive you want to backup to a unix/linux or even windowz box. For e.g I have a windowz box which have huge raid drive. My sun is a puny SparcLX. So what I do is, install a samba pkg in my SparcLX, configure it to share the drive I want to backup, start samba on the SparcLX, than from the windowz box I map the drive like a normal win box, than ran windows backup on it. Hope that helps Jimmy. I didn't go to detail about how-to. If you wanna read it up go docs.sun.com for nfs mounting or do google search on it. FYI, there's a lot of other ways to do it, I just thought of that two. Best of luck azu

azu, You ROCK! Great answer. Herman

Hi everybody, I just want to mention, you better be careful when you make a backup with "tar" command because original versions of "tar" do NOT make backup of few types of files. for example your link files will be backuped up as normal files and when you restore your backup file, you won't have the same link files and you have to make them one by one. In this case, "cpio" would be more powerful than "tar". Please try to find out more about "cpio". regard Payman