Re: [SLUG] Inexpensive Tape Drive

From: Paul M Foster (paulf@quillandmouse.com)
Date: Thu Aug 30 2001 - 19:13:19 EDT


On Thu, Aug 30, 2001 at 01:55:54PM -0400, Robert Haeckl wrote:

<snip>

> Actually, the intent is to have fun learning to use 'dump' and 'restore'
> to a tape device.

<snip>

> By the way, has anybody tried using the floppy as a nonrewind tape
> device, just for the fun of it? Can you use the 'mt' command on it?

I don't think the fd* devices are set up to be used this way. I do use
floppy-interface _tapes_ (Travan) for my systems.

Re: dump and restore, I don't know precisely how dump and restore work
(bit-by-bit copy?). However, I'd caution against doing tar backups, even
though that's what tar (Tape ARchive) was originally for. If something
goes bad in the middle of a tar archive (as happens with tapes) the rest
of the archive is garbage. Better to use cpio or afio. Doing it this
way, each file is individual copied to the backup medium and if one goes
bad, at least the rest of the files might still be good.

I favor a little script called tob (Tape Oriented Backup). You can
select the type of archiving done (tar, cpio, afio), and compress the
files as they are backed up. So you get a thousand gzipped files on your
tape, each individually copied. Interface is simple, as in:

tob -full allfiles

I use this at home and at the office.

Paul
(P.S. Did I mention I don't like GUIs? ;-)



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