Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!csrd.uiuc.edu!uicsrd.csrd.uiuc.edu!kai
From: kai@uicsrd.csrd.uiuc.edu (Kuck And Associates)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: wbak working, but slow
Keywords: backups, wbak, dn10000
Message-ID: <1990Jun13.012834.1159@csrd.uiuc.edu>
Date: 13 Jun 90 01:28:34 GMT
Sender: usenet@csrd.uiuc.edu (news)
Distribution: comp
Organization: UIUC Center for Supercomputing Research and Development
Lines: 17

Thanks to all who responded to my plea for help getting wbak to work to an
Exabyte tape drive on a remote Unix host.  My backup script contains:

wbak -stdout //quantum | rsh illiant dd ibs=8k obs=32k of=/dev/nrcartridge

which works fine.  The key to the solution was using 8k input blocks (I had
4k originally).

The only problem left is how slow this is.  I can juggle our backup schedule
around so the dn10000 is dumped overnight, but it seems a little strange that
such a blazing fast system (and I do mean FAST!) should have such a slow,
plodding backup utility.  It takes over 4 hours to dump a single 700 Mb disk,
more time than it takes to dump the entire 2 Gb from our Sequent S81 (to the
same drive).

Patrick Wolfe   (pat@kai.com, kailand!pat)
System Programmer/Operations Manager, Kuck & Associates