Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tiamat!quintro!bep
From: bep@quintro.uucp (Bryan Province)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Omniback
Message-ID: <1990May24.210804.1601@quintro.uucp>
Date: 24 May 90 21:08:04 GMT
Reply-To: bep@quintro.UUCP (Bryan Province)
Organization: none
Lines: 35

I have been using Omniback for a couple of months now and I am NOT a happy
camper 8(   (flame on)

First of all it takes FFFOOOOORRREEEVVVEEERRR to restore something from an 8mm
tape.  This is apparently due to the fact that Omniback writes the whole backup
(in our case, 12 nodes) to one file on the tape.  In order to restore even one
file Omniback must search through the whole backup.  The few times that I have
tried to restore something it has taken ALL DAY!  This to me makes the backup
almost useless.  I read in the release notes that it is possible to make
Omniback write several files to one tape.  Although the way it is worded it
sounds like they don't recommend it and it will also make backups and restores
more complicated.  Has anyone tried this?  Does it improve or degrade speed on
backups and restores?  Please send me mail on this.  Inquiring minds want to know.

Also the reliability is questionable.  I was getting some errors on backups so I
did an index of the tape and it looked like everything was there.  I found out
from Apollo that the index is misleading!  Omniback puts an index of the files
it is going to ATTEMPT to backup at the beginning of the tape.  So getting an
index does not confirm that it was able to backup the contents of the file.  If
this is common in most tape schemes I appollogize for my stupidity :^)   I just
recently tried to restore a file from a backup that reported no errors in
relation to backing up this disk or file.  The file I got back was empty.  This
does NOT give me a warm fuzzy feelling about the reliability of my backups.  I
could try to have it -list_all as it does the backup but that would be HUGE and
impossible to look through since we do a full backup every night.

Is anyone out there having better, the same, or worse luck than I with using
Omniback?  I am seriously considering getting the backup software from Workstation
Solutions if I continue to have problems and if I can use the software with my
current Apollo hardware.  Here's a good sales opportunity WS guys.
-- 
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Bryan Province     Glenayre Corp.           quintro!bep@lll-winken.llnl.gov
                   Quincy,  IL              tiamat!quintro!bep@uunet
           "Surf Kansas, There's no place like home, Dude."