[KLUG Members] backing up to remote tape drive

[John Pesce]

I have a Suse 9.3 box with a tight firewall that only allows inbound ssh
and limited outbound. I need to backup ~300GB to a tape drive on another
computer. I regularly backup 160GB of compressed files locally to the
tape. I tried to find the proper way to backup the Suse box to it, but
it doesn't seem to be working right.

I ussually do a du -shc <directorys> to get ~<160GB of files and then
give them to a tar -cvf /dev/st2 <directorys> to back them up.

For the remote backup I did the du -shc and then the command:

tar --label=ARCHIVE-01-23-2006 -cv -f - b 20 <directorys> | ssh
user at remote 'dd of=/dev/st2 obs=20b'

However, It said device full about 20GB shy of the 160GB set.

What could have went wrong? Is there a better way to do this?
Ideally I want to use the verify option.

Thanks.