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From: larry@tapa.uucp (Larry Pajakowski)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.xenix
Subject: Re: Xenix Multi-tape backup
Message-ID: <1990Jan14.204242.5809@tapa.uucp>
Date: 14 Jan 90 20:42:42 GMT
References: <569@runxtsa.runx.oz.au> <2603@thebes.Thalatta.COM>
Reply-To: larry@.UUCP (Larry Pajakowski)
Organization: Pata System Consultants
Lines: 11

Be careful with tar for backups.  While multi-tape backups work as advertised
one anoying problem is that tar won't backup empty directories and thus won't
restore them.  This seems mostly a problem with some of the queue
directories in /usr/spool/lp.

We've used afio which was posted many moons ago with good results.  It lets
you tailor the amount of buffering and also will double buffer if you ask.
Since it operates like cpio (and read and writes cpio formats) you need to
supply it with file names to backup.  One hint to reduce head contention is to
do a find of all files and directores into a temp file and then run afio
(or cpio if inclined) from that temp file.