[SLL] How do I back up LVM Volumes to Tape...?

[Todd Carrico]

All:

We recently replaced our company server with a shiny new Dell which came
preinstalled with SuSE Enterprise and LVMs.   We got everything all set and
running, and now I cannot seem to find any way to back up our 200+GB
partitions to our SCSI 400G tape drives.  All I can find is information on
doing snapshots and using crude programs like tar that do not support
incrementals and interactive restores.  I would really prefer to do dumps
with varying backup levels to tape.  Can this be done with LVMs or do I need
to rebuild the entire system with ext2/3 partitions.  I cannot imagine
people are using LVM commercially without any means to backup to tape.  Is
there a special version of dump for LVM?  Can I do snapshots to a hard
partition (ext2/3) and then dump that to tape.  What am I missing? Please
advise...

If it matters, this is SUSE 10 Enterprise on a Dell 2900 with a Sony SCSI
AIT4 tape drive.

Thanks, 

Todd

tcarrico at sprintmail.com