Looking for good ways to dump and restore filesystems

[Heather Klapman]

I am looking for a less awkward way to restore our backup tapes than
we currently use.

Currently, we use the Berkeley dump and restor facilities.  Briefly,
restoring from a dump entails either doing a full restore, or
using a command called dumpdir which yields a listing of all
files in the dump and enables a partial restore of named files.
If this option is chosen, the files are restored given the name
of their original inode number and then must be moved (by hand or 
via a shell script) to their actual filenames.

I have written a utility that issues a dumpdir, greps for a pattern 
and then does a restor of all files matching that pattern, creating 
any directory hierarchy needed, which avoids the problem of moving 
files named by their inode number to a hierarchical structure later.  
This utility is only slightly less awkward than restoring manually 
and is still time consuming to use (its good point is that it does 
let one restore a hierarchy without doing a full restore).

We have rejected the idea of doing our backups using tar because
it is much more time consuming.  We have not investigated cpio,
although my impression is that it is similar to tar.

We are running a kernel that claims to be compatible with both
Berkeley and System V software.  We'd appreciate any solutions
or suggestions you may have.  Thanks!

				Heather Klapman
				Programmer
				Program in Computing-UCLA