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From: agm@daphne.stl.stc.co.uk (Andrew G. Minter)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Backup and Restore
Message-ID: <4208@stl.stc.co.uk>
Date: 11 Apr 91 15:34:42 GMT
Sender: news@stl.stc.co.uk
Reply-To: agm@daphne.stl.stc.co.uk (Andrew G. Minter)
Organization: STC Technology Ltd, Harlow, Essex, England
Lines: 46

I've been having lots of fun with backup and restore under Minix.  I've
had to do complete dumps and restores 2-3 times due to repartitioning my
hard disk.  Yesterday I did it again when I installed a 100Mb 105AT
Quantum ProDrive in my Elonex laptop (incidently, this is a fast IDE
drive and I got it working with no trouble at all - recommended).

I've also tried on various occasions to restore individual files from a backup.

The things I would really like to be able to do are (in order of preference):

1.  Dump and restore whole file systems very reliably.
2.  Restore individual files or sets of files with out going through a vast
    pile of floppies.
3.  Incremental dumps.
4.  Dumps of part of a file system (subtree).

I'd also like compression, I think this could actually make the dump
faster as well as save disk space.

My problem is this:  I can't seem to find a good piece of software that
will do all these things.

The tar/[compress]/vol approach more or less meets criteria 1 and 4 but
you're really cooked if you have even one bad block on one floppy.

The dump/restore package posted a while back looks like a good start,
but it has plenty of bugs.  I had to patch it to make it restore whole
file systems at all. It also seems to have a tendancy to lose file
ownership information.  It doesn't do compression.  Overall I like it,
but I'm terrified it will lose my data for me if I rely on it.

I'm getting pretty desperate folks and I can't believe that nobody else
has the same problem.  What do people do?

If there really is nothing about that will do the job and there is
enough interest then I think I'll go ahead and write something.

Andrew
--
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| Andrew G. Minter            | Email: agm@stl.stc.co.uk       |
| Principal Research Engineer | Phone: +44 279 429531 ext 3165 |
| STC Technology Ltd          | Fax:   +44 279 454187          |
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