*BSD News Article 30416


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From: alanp@parker.EECS.Berkeley.EDU (Alan Pearson)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: How do people without tapes do backups?
Date: 16 May 1994 03:09:46 -0700
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 26
Message-ID: <2r7gpa$9v3@parker.EECS.Berkeley.EDU>
NNTP-Posting-Host: parker.eecs.berkeley.edu

I dont have a tape drive, but have 2 pretty large hard disks (420MB and
340MB).  I just installed the 420, so there's lots of free space and I can
do my backups by tarring entire filesystems to a file (with the -z option
to get compressed tars) and then splitting them and writing the split files
to disks.  This is a pain in the butt, but I can't see a better way since
dumpfs and "tar cMf /dev/fd0a" don't do compression so I would need about 200
disketts.  Forget that.  It's bad enough as it is.  Anyone know of programs
that do compressed backups?  I ran across a program that tried to do this but
was very, very, unreliable.  It started tar and gzip as children and put the
output of them to /dev/fd0a, but frequently there would be a hard write error,
and the program would halt instead of trying to recover.  After doing 20 
disks, and the program halting and then having to start over from scratch,
I gave up.  This guy's program is no longer on my machine.

Alternately, are there drivers for any of the myriad of tape devices that
patch into the floppy port?  I see that SCSI drives are supported but I have
IDE, and buying a SCSI controller plus a SCSI tape drive (which is often 3x
the price of the floppy-based tape drives) is way too much.  Probably more
than $500. 

thanks.

-- 
alan pearson

alanp@cory.eecs.berkeley.edu                                 UC Berkeley EECS