saving directories when they don't fit on 1 tape

[Mark J Elkins]

>From article <1466 at xyzzy.UUCP>, by rice at dg-rtp.dg.com (Brian Rice):
> In article <1454 at mdbs.UUCP> wsmith at mdbs.UUCP (Bill Smith) writes:
> 
>>Is there an automatic, reasonably portable way to save a directory and all 
>>files beneath it on tape when it does not fit on a single piece of media 
>>and can not easily be split at the next level down in the directory tree?
> 
> Use cpio.  First, there are some cpio's which support spreading
> tape files across several tapes.
[Deleted example using tail and head]

> Obviously, this method will fail if one file occupies, say, 160 MB
> and the remaining 399 together only take 30 MB.

What about using 'afio'?  It has an 's' option - to specify the length
of your tapes.  When it hits this value, it prompts for the next tape.
Its also 'cpio' compatable!

 ie 'find whatever -print | afio -ovs 150m /dev/streamer_tape'

There is one bug however - the internal buffer size for cpio is 5120
bytes.  If you backup to a tape which is not a multiple of 5 Meg, the
backup works fine (it writes a partial block at the end of the tape)
but when restoring - it will only read full blocks of data - so will
not read any partial blocks.

This is a pain because just because you are meant to be able to write
60 Meg to a 60 Meg streamer - is not always true (I can sometimes get
62 Meg).  To be safe, I said "Only write 58 Meg".  It writes fine -
just never quite restores!

What guarantee do we have that all 600 ft tapes really have at least
600 ft of tape on them?

Has this problem been addressed ?

The archive it writes is 'ascii cpio' format. However - when trying to
restore 'ascii cpio' with 'cpio' - its possible to get problems with
certain files with numbers in their names (terminfo).  Does 'afio'
address this problem?
-- 
/"""\  Mark J Elkins, Olivetti Africa, Unix Software Support
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