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From: haral@unisol.UUCP (Haral Tsitsivas)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards,comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: UNIX tape backup utilities ( SysAdmin from UniSolutions Assoc.)
Message-ID: <285@unisol.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 4-Sep-87 22:58:10 EDT
Article-I.D.: unisol.285
Posted: Fri Sep  4 22:58:10 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 6-Sep-87 06:23:09 EDT
References: <153@tijc02.UUCP> <1143@ttidca.TTI.COM> <358@mcdsun.UUCP> <1153@ttidca.TTI.COM> <284@unisol.UUCP> <367@mcdsun.UUCP>
Reply-To: haral@unisol.UUCP (Haral Tsitsivas)
Organization: UniSolutions Associates, Culver City, CA
Lines: 27
Keywords: menus security backups
Xref: mnetor comp.unix.wizards:4106 comp.unix.questions:3905

In article <367@mcdsun.UUCP> fnf@mcdsun.UUCP (Fred Fish) writes:
>In article <284@unisol.UUCP> haral@unisol.UUCP (Haral Tsitsivas) writes:
>>message)...   The only UNIX vendor that has even come close to providing
>>a real tape checking utility is MASSCOMP...
>Not quite, Motorola has been shipping a product called bru (Backup and
>Restore Utility) for several years as a standard part of their Unix
>system...

I do remember BRU now from earlier days when it was posted to the net in
binary form for the 4.1C release of BSD, but, since I don't work with any
Motorola releases, I couldn't comment.

Another issue though is, how many system administrators can keep the system
down long enough to do block by block checking of dump tapes?  If you have a
production level system (or a large development system) with several eagles
(and GBytes) you may only have enough time to do complete backups and not
block by block checking of the tape and disk files (users never want to lose
the machine for long periods of time, or be slowed down while a backup is
done when they are logged in).  If a tape-speed (or near tape-speed) method
for verifying the sanity of backups exists and works reliably (under most
systems, although not as reliably as the block comparison method) then most
people will use that...

--Haral Tsitsivas
  UniSolutions Associates
  (213) 641-6739
  ...!seismo!scgvaxd!ashtate!unisol!haral