backup to floppies

[Bud Hovell]

For those who have the tape-backup unit, please hit the 'n' key. This is a
posting for the large majority of us who do not.

I've been giving a bit of thought to a problem that I - and I assume *many*
other unix-pc folks - have regarding backup on 3B1 machines w/o tape drive.

First, doing backup on this machine with floppies is simply impractical as a
routine chore. E.g., I've only got 60% of my 67-meg disk filled, and that
requires about 110 discs to back up on standard floppies. NOT the answer.

But......what if there were a way to load the stock vanilla system stuff into
a temporary directory, then have software that would find all files on the
installed (current) system, and either:

	1. Copy and compress into a mirror-image archive directory any
	file existing on the current system, but *not* existing on the vanilla
	system........or........

	2. If the same file *exists* on both systems, then do a 'diff' to the
	file 'filename.diff' to capture the differences and compress that and
	put it in the archive directory.

When done, it would seem that the archive of compressed files would be of
manageable size to copy to floppies.

If one later needed to restore the system:

	1. Install the vanilla stuff from the original discs.
	
	2. Load the non-vanilla software necessary to perform the backup.

	3. Load the archive stuff into a temporary directory.

	4. Run a program that finds every file in the vanilla (current)
	system, then uncompresses its associated diff file and patches
	it to the vanilla file, then recompresses the archive 'diff' file.

	5. Run a program that uncompresses and copies to the current system
	any file in the archive *not* having the ending 'diff' (or whatever),
	then recompresses the archive file. One by one.

	6. Run a program that takes a list of all the mode/owner/group settings
	for files in the archive and updates the current system files to match.

Granted, this would probably take a *fair* amount of clock time - but it is not
exactly quick to do it with floppies now. And it should be able to run pretty
well unattended, I would think. Like while you are asleep or out drinking beer
:-).

I don't know - is something like this possible/practical? What is the flaw?
 
                                 Bud Hovell

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