Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!spool.mu.edu!cs.umn.edu!kksys!wd0gol!rathe!orbus!gn
From: gn@orbus
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: WARNING: Dump/Restore
Message-ID: <1991Jun8.002958.17466@orbus.uucp>
Date: 8 Jun 91 00:29:58 GMT
Sender: gn@orbus.uucp
Organization: Society For the Prevention of Necrobovinism
Lines: 36


Last week I had a disk crash on my two month old station (400 Meg). I called  
NeXT and arranged for motorola (NICE!) to come on site and replace the drive. 
Previous to their arrival I backed up the old disk to three 150 meg tapes
using a Viper 150 via dump.

They arrived and swapped the disk, quick and easy. I then started to do the
restore of the disk. This is where my nightmare began.

The first tape started fine, but after about 10 minutes I noticed the NeXT
had crashed and I had to reboot the system. After rebooting I noticed
that restore and core dumped. I restarted the restore and it made it to
the point where it prompted for the next volume. I provided the second
volume, whereupon it core dumped and crashed again. 

Beginning to despair, I started to use restore interactively, I marked
the entire filesystem for reloading ('add /.') and when prompted, told
restore to begin with volume two. This went fine until I was prompted 
for volume three. I inserted volume three, restore queried the tape and
informed me that it was not volume three but volume two. I had two
volume twos!. I then restarted the restore and used volume three as 
volume two and everything was fine.

This is a little condensed, notably I tried the 's' option of restore and
it was unable to recognize anything.

This is truly depressing, it appears as though restore is unable, for
various reasons, to handle multi-volume backups. Without the ability or
money to go to a different backup method this makes the NeXT much more
a reliability.

Greg Noel
Rathe, inc.
uunet!umn-cs!rathe!orbus!gn

"Nothing Works, and Nobody Cares."      -W. Allen