*BSD News Article 21547


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From: prang@du9ds4.fb9dv.uni-duisburg.de (Juergen Prang)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux,comp.os.linux.misc,comp.os.386bsd.misc
Subject: Re: [A]RAWDISK.SYS: QIC-80 Backup of non-DOS disks
Date: 24 Sep 93 00:01:08 GMT
Organization: Universitaet Duisburg GH
Lines: 52
Distribution: inet
Message-ID: <prang.748828868@du9ds4>
References: <prang.748698072@du9ds4> <27rsc4$fu5@track.taz.de>
NNTP-Posting-Host: du9ds4.fb9dv.uni-duisburg.de

buk@taz.de ($ Burkhard Kohl) writes:

>Juergen Prang (prang@du9ds4.fb9dv.uni-duisburg.de) wrote:

>: Currently a lot of work is done, to implement a driver for
>: QIC-80 (Floppycontroller-) Streamertapes. In the meantime I
>: decided to write a DOS device driver, that enables logical
>: access to non-DOS disks/partitions under DOS.

>As far as I know there is an drive for floppy tape streamers 
>for linux already available on sunsite.unc.edu:
>	/pub/Linux/kernel/tapes/ftape-0.9.tar.z
>or even higher.

I know of this driver too, I even tried it around the middle of
the year, but was somewhat disappointed. So I decided to write
the *DOS* driver to circumvent the potential problems ftape had
at that times, because I wanted to be able to backup my Linux HD
(I heard recently, that the last version ftape-0.9.6 should be
much more stable and reliable than earlier versions, but I
can not install it until I'll upgrade to at least 0.99pl12)

For now I'm able to take complete snapshots of my system (or at
least of my root partition) and are able to boot immediately after
restore. Something that is of some interest to me is exchanging
different free Unix OS's (ie Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD) on the same
partition in around three quarters of an hour via tape (or even shorter,
if I zip the complete partition into a file on our Novell server :-)

>As an aside I would like to say that we should not talk fo
>"QIC-80" drivers since QIC-80 only specifies the tape format.
>The signal interface is defined in (QIC-117 - hope that's right,
>i don't have my QIC interface list at hand). 

In terms of QIC specs you may be right (I don't know them), but
I used the term in the usual common sense to denote the type
of tape drive I have. But to clarify another point: I did not
write a QIC-xxx device driver for DOS, but a driver that maps
an arbitrary portion of my disk (my Unix partition) into a regular
DOS file, which I am capable to compress and backup using my
Central Point Backup Software delivered with my IOMEGA tape drive
(this gives me an image backup of my Unix partition in QIC-80
format, to be exact) or using any other useful DOS program and
storage medium (see paragraph above).

back,up & away
Juergen
-- 
   Juergen Prang           |     prang@du9ds4.fb9dv.uni-duisburg.de
   University of Duisburg  |********************************************
   Electrical Engineering  |     Logic is a systematic method of coming
   Dept. of Dataprocessing |     to the wrong conclusion with confidence