Best way to backup SCO Xenix/UNIX

[Kevin Weller]

I've been making backups with find and cpio for over a year now, and I
have a (relatively) friendly shellscript front-end for it all which
I'd post if I could solve a thorny problem with the compression
scheme.  The problem is that, since I pipe the cpio output through
compress and my own volume splitter (restore is just the reverse), I
can't start a restore in the middle of a multi-volume backup.  This
means that a bad volume in the middle stops me from restoring the rest
of the way.  I've tried and tried to figure out compress's scheme for
packing the data so I could uncompress starting in the middle, but no
luck.

I find the idea of backing up 180 megs of data without compression
ludicrous, so is there another high-performance compression utility
out there that will do the job (let me start uncompressing from the
middle of a file, which is essentially what a multi-volume backup is)?
Any pointers would be appreciated, and if and when I make my backup
scheme adequately reliable, I'll post the package of files to get it
going.

Thanks -- Kev

PS: I use diskettes to make backups since I can't afford a decent tape
drive, but the principle is the same for tape backups.  Even if I
COULD afford a tape drive, I don't think I have another hardware
interrupt slot available for the controller (can't use the floppy
controller either).

--
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Kevin L. Weller                                 /-------+--------------------\
internet: n025fc at tamuts.tamu.edu                |  aTm  |  GIG 'EM, AGGIES!  |
CIS:      73327,1447  (but I rarely log on)     \-------+--------------------/
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%SYS-E-BADOPSYS, Fatal system error, DEC VMS halting  / "And now for something
-SYS-I-GETUNIX, Replace with UNIX immediately!       /  completely different."
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