Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!ll-xn!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!LL-VLSI.ARPA!malpass
From: malpass@LL-VLSI.ARPA (Don Malpass)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.zenith.z100
Subject: backup using [pk]arc
Message-ID: <8805021419.AA10001@ll-vlsi.arpa>
Date: 2 May 88 14:19:26 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 28


	Does a disk backup program using arc format exist?  It would
have to march recursively through a directory tree, clone the
tree (up to the top branches) on the target disk, and presumably put
all files from a given directory "xyz" into a file called "xyz.arc".
Something intelligent would have to be done for the two special cases
in which a directory name DID use a file extension (which lots of us
don't, but which is not prohibited) or in which directory xyz already
contained a file called xyz.arc.  I think arc can get upset by
recursive entries when it tries to unarc.  Alternately, it could clone
the entire tree and dump all the files of each subdirectory into
"allfiles.arc" placed in every subdirectory.  (That sounds
like a better system, now that I think about it.)  Even without
a RESTORE program this would be useful since PKFIND is so handy
for finding needed files.  A restore program could come later since
there IS some necessity for restoring a complete hard disk after
reformatting it, and doing it manually would be a pain, but for
individual files, pkfind is great.
	Now that I am blessed with an ethernet connection to a Sun and
relatively painless backup provision I would like to halve the file
space in the Sun that my monthly backup takes.  But it also strikes me
that backup to floppy would be much better if it were done in .arc
format.  It might take more computer time, but the time spent feeding
it disks would be cut down a lot.  I haven't given any thought to
what should be done when an .arc being created runs out of disk space.
	As far as I know, there is no way to use FASTBACK with an
HZ-100, but if I'm wrong about that I'd like to know that too.
	don	[malpass@LL-vlsi]