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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!bruce.cs.monash.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!yeshua.marcam.com!usc!cs.utexas.edu!geraldo.cc.utexas.edu!sylvester.cc.utexas.edu!not-for-mail From: vax@sylvester.cc.utexas.edu (Vax) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Subject: Re: backup: tar vs cpio? Date: 28 Feb 1994 03:37:41 -0600 Organization: The University of Texas - Austin Lines: 50 Message-ID: <2kse15$4np@sylvester.cc.utexas.edu> References: <MARK.822.2D6F935C@ardsley.business.uwo.ca> NNTP-Posting-Host: sylvester.cc.utexas.edu In article <MARK.822.2D6F935C@ardsley.business.uwo.ca>, Mark_Bramwell <MARK@ardsley.business.uwo.ca> wrote: >Currently I am doing this from root.... >tar cvf /dev/rst0 * >Is there a reason that I should be doing something else? >I want a backup that I can use for individual files as well as a full system >restore. Call me old-fashioned, but I have found through trial and error, that dump and restore are less error-prone when restoring individual files, and directory subtrees. Try, for example, extracting all -but- a specific directory hierarchy when using GNUtar. Ick. Here's why not to use tar (subjective opinion, bugs may be fixed): When using -d to compare a tar file to the pwd, tar -df /dev/rmt8 (no period) When using -c to create a file containing pwd and all subdirs, tar -cf /dev/rmt8 . (period) When extracting with -x to the pwd, do; tar -xf /dev/nrst0 (no period) It is unpleasant to find inconsistencies (IMHO) like this, after spending hours and hours waiting for the tape to run through (I have 525MB quarter-inch tapes, they take hours) restore has a nifty interactive interface, much like a Unix shell, that gives you this nice warm feeling that everything will work right the first time, and it usually does. Besides, it also has support for multi-level backups (that's incremental) and does cool things like that. The down side is that you probably can't read it from MS-DOS, but who cares. :) You should also put it on your rescue diskette.. speaking of which, I have a diskette that I use. It has: vi fsck fdisk restore halt reboot disklabel newfs mount init chmod rm cp mt df mkdir sync sh cat (as well as /etc stuff, /dev stuff, mdec stuff, etc) Each is the "full" version of the program, so you can "rm -rf" and offending tree, etc. I use "echo *" instead of "ls". I find this disk so useful, I'm tempted to make it ftp-able. Would anyone else like such a disk? They are decievingly hard to make. There are many dependencies for some programs. I have tested this disk, and it has everything a tape-user (who uses dump(1)) would need to recover the system from a file system problem. -- Protect our endangered bandwidth - reply by email. NO BIG SIGS! VaX#n8 vax@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu - Don't blame me if the finger daemon is down