Obtaining a hardcopy of UNIX backups.

[Don Speck]

In article <13128 at brl-adm.ARPA>, rbj at icst-cmr.arpa (Root Boy Jim) writes:
> I once looked for a place to put -v into dump as well. It's certainly
> not obvious.

dump knows nothing about pathnames, it reads files in inode order.

(Dump isn't verbose enough already?  Why shouldn't "-v" mean "verify"?)

> The easiest thing to do is run another dump piped to restore in the
> background before the real dump, without the update option.

"restore t" only reads the directories, which are the first thing on
the first tape, so this would feed it a lot of needless data, and result
in a messy SIGPIPE.  Instead, you should re-mount the first tape, and let
restore read that.  This way at least you verify that some of the tape is
actually readable!  Tape drive problems can sneak up on you if you don't
do this for at least some dumps (such as the ones that fit on one tape).

Don Speck   speck at vlsi.caltech.edu  {amdahl,ames!elroy}!cit-vax!speck