Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ucbvax!CITHEX.CALTECH.EDU!carl
From: carl@CITHEX.CALTECH.EDU (Carl J Lydick)
Newsgroups: comp.os.vms
Subject: Re: another BACKUP question
Message-ID: <880524052655.138@CitHex.Caltech.Edu>
Date: 24 May 88 12:34:05 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 22


 >          In doing a backup of files on a disk to another disk, if the
 >          directory where the files are to be placed doesn't exist,
 >          then it will be created. This is all well and good. However,
 >          when doing a tape backup of files on a disk, the directories
 >          are unnecessary and waste space on the tape if you are
 >          backing up large numbers of individual directories with files
 >          in them. The intuitive solution of backup/exclude=(*.dir)
 >          apparently does not work, presumably because BACKUP is
 >          convince that it needs a directory to put the files in,
 >          ignoring the sequential nature of the tape. 
 > 
 >          My question: are the directory files on tape as useless as
 >          they seem? Is there a way to avoid them, if they are? 

Backup copies the directories to tape so that it knows:
	1)  What the file attributes, protections, etc. are supposed to
	    be for the directories, for when you restore the files to disk
	    (in case you restore them to a different place, or the directories
	    were deleted between your backup and restore); and
	2)  So incremental backups leave you with only the files that existed
	    when the incremental backup was performed.
You can't force it to leave out all the directories.