Best way to backup SCO Xenix/UNIX
Anthony DeBoer
adeboer at gjetor.geac.COM
Tue Apr 9 05:13:07 AEST 1991
In article <1991Apr7.044627.5298 at ucselx.sdsu.edu> aty at ucselx.sdsu.edu (young a t) writes:
>Got to be careful with this. We recently had the disk controller crash
>on our 3B2 system, which had been backed up with cpio as you describe.
>The disks we lost had all the users' home directories. So we said,
>OK, we'll just restore those guys on the SUN workstation from the
>backup tapes, right? Wrong. The SUN version of cpio can't read
>multi-volume backups; we only saved the guys who were on the first
>tape. There are probably other Berkeley-derived systems whose cpio
>can only read one tape. BEWARE!
>From a lot of experiences in our shop restoring backups on machines other
than the one that made them, or of needing one file from the fifth tape of
a set, my conclusion is that multi-tape backups are evil.
What I've started using is a small program that acts something like the C-News
batcher, generating backup lists each containing no more than a certain number
of megs worth of data, and then backing up each list to a single tape. That
way I can restore all or part of any individual tape independently, I'm not
completely dead in the water if tape two dies, and I don't have to worry about
differing end-of-tape continuation implementations.
Any other views on this area?
--
Anthony DeBoer NAUI#Z8800 | adeboer at gjetor.geac.com | Programmer (n): One who
Geac J&E Systems Ltd. | uunet!geac!gjetor!adeboer | makes the lies the
Toronto, Ontario, Canada | #include <disclaimer.h> | salesman told come true.
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