Copying directory trees from U*NX to DOS

[Leslie Mikesell]

In article <591 at hscfvax.harvard.edu> mohamed at hscfvax.harvard.edu (Mohamed Ellozy) writes:
>When our users close accounts they often want a backup of their stuff.
>No problem, tar it off and sell them the tape.
>
>We are now, for better or for worse, in the age of the PC.  Hence many
>of our users are asking us to back up their accounts to diskettes (DOS
>only so far).
>
>We have a PC clone on our Ethernet, so the actual physical transfer of
>files is no problem.  But what is the best way to get large parts of
>the directory tree down?  Also, how do you deal with filenames on U*NX
>which will map to the same name on DOS, e. g. longname1.data and
>longname2.data will both give longname.dat.  Also how do you deal with
>non-ascii files?

First you should decide if you really want to access the data under DOS
or just hang onto it for the purpose of transporting it to another
unix machine.  In the latter case you need to maintain the original
unix filenames so using tar or cpio to bundle the files would work,
followed by spliting into a size that will fit on the DOS diskettes.
There are some DOS versions of tar and cpio that could extract the
files on a PC if the archive is put back into one piece.  Under DOS,
the ARC program is popular for bundling files together with compression,
and unix versions have been posted to the net.  However, ARC does not
provide for subdirectory names.   ZOO is a similar program that has
been posted to the net for both unix and dos, and it does provide
support for subdirectories and for maintaining unix names with the
ability to truncate them when extracting under dos.  It's only disadvantage
is that the unix machine where you want to extract the archive may
not have the program unless you keep a copy of the source in another
format.
I would expect that keeping archives on DOS diskettes would be a
pretty common practice, since most unix machines have unique tape
and disk formats and everyone eventually has to come up with a way
to get PC files in and out.  The rb/sb communication programs combined
with procomm using ymodem batch protocol works nicely, with kermit as
a close second if you don't have a network connection or a compatible
disk drive.
The only thing missing from zoo that would make it ideal for this
purpose is the ability to automatically break it's archive into
arbitrary sized pieces (and extract a file given only the correct piece(s)).

 Les Mikesell