Restoring a tape backup after a crash

[Kevin O'Gorman]

Well, I had to do it again, and it went a bit better this time, but there are
still a few funnies.  I'm hoping for comments and enlightenment from the net.
And some of you may be interested in some of the gotchas.

I had just gotten a bunch of stuff, and was putting it in various places in
this ever-shrinking bedroom (Telebit Trailblazer modem, Macintosh II, for
instance).  I was installing cables and moving equipment to make room.
Somewhere in the process, ghengis (the 3b1) started choking on his disk drive,
and having serious trouble running anything at all, and even in rebooting.

THAT VERY MORINING I had backed up!!!!  Will wonders never cease.  Attilla's
disk (he's the 7300 with the outboard 80-MB drive) had just come back from
repair, and I was going to install the backup on him.  So the backup was
current.

For reasons I have discussed here before, my backups are 'by name', and are
of the root directory '/', so they contain everything, without regard to dates.

I went to install this thing, and after fumbling around a bit, thought every-
thing was going fine: I had told it to ignore which files were more recent, and
the first tape was spinning okay.  It died as soon as I mounted the second tape.
The system was so strange at this point that I could not use the tape, and after
rebooting, I could not log on.

After some thought, it occurred to me that the Tape software keeps some stuff
in /tmp which might be getting overwritten by the first tape.  So, I
started in again: Foundation Set, Tape Software, restore folders.  I selected
all folders in the root directory except /tmp and /mnt (the floppy had been
mounted when I took the tape backup, and its files turned out to be on the
tape).  As soon as the reload was finished, I shut down and restarted (I've got
lots of software that needs to be initialized right).

Now most things worked okay, but there are some funnies:
	1) The tape drive was unusable, but became okay when I removed and
		reinstalled the software.  I really don't have a clue about
		this.
	2) Rn gave me a greeting message that I had not seen since I first
		installed it.  Some file somewhere must tell it whether I'm
		a new user, but I can't imagine why it got lost.

I haven't done a whole lot else yet, although my newsfeed has dropped some news
on me, so I know that's working.

Anyone have any comments?