Backing up Linux box to Win box's tape drive

[Stephen L Arnold]

On 31 May 99, "Stephen Lavelle" <ausvic at mail.austasia.net> had 
questions about Backing up Linux box to Win box's tape drive:  

> I am using a Samba server on a RedHat 5.2 box this box has no
> tape drive I would like to back up my network clients to a tape
> drive on one of the win boxes; 
> Is the following feasible;
> mount the windows shares using smbmount
> tar up the dirs/files
> transfer the tar files onto the win machine
> Back up using the win machines backup programme

There's no reason I can see why it wouldn't work, but

> If not any other suggestions?

It seems like a manually intensive job; why not just move the 
tapedrive to the linux box and write yourself a nice shell script 
to execute via a cron job?  That way you just mount and run smbtar.

Wouldn't that be a bit more straight-forward?  Besides, linux boxes 
should generally own your best hardware (you can do so much more 
with it that way...).

Steve

************************************************
Steve Arnold  CLE (Certifiable Linux Evangelist)
http://www.rain.org/~sarnold