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From: billd@celerity.UUCP (Bill Davidson)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions,comp.unix.microport
Subject: Re: dump/restore
Keywords: cpio is not a real backup program
Message-ID: <180@celerity.UUCP>
Date: 28 Oct 88 00:43:37 GMT
References: <178@celerity.UUCP> <229@dcs.UUCP>
Reply-To: billd@celerity.UUCP (Bill Davidson)
Organization: FPS Computing, San Diego CA
Lines: 24

A couple of postings and several mail messages to me all say about the
same thing about my desire to use dump/restore.  They all essentially
say, "What's wrong with tar and cpio?"  If you've been following a number
of discussions concerning floppy backups recently in comp.unix.microport
you'd know that cpio occasionally loses something.  I've have it die
after reading about 25Meg of a tape that had 35Meg on it originally.
This is completely unacceptable.  The reason that tar is unacceptable
it that I can not back up my entire hard disk on one tape (130Meg hard disk
and ~40Meg tape) and I have to figure out by hand how many tapes and which
directories to tar to each tape.  It doesn't work at all for incremental
backups.  I have to make a complete list of files for an incremental and
that list is usually too long for tar.  Cpio takes file names from stdin
so I have to use it for incrementals and because of the problem stated
above, that worries me.  Also, neither program is particularly convient
to restore a file with.  dump/restore is a much friendlier program.
One person did mention that the format does change somewhat from machine
to machine.  That could cause some problems but I would like to at least
try.  Oh, and for the xenix-person that mentioned it, System V/AT does
not come with any version of dump/restore (although it has a header file
describing the format which is almost completely different from it's BSD
counterpart).

	-- Bill Davidson
	.....!ucsd!celerity!billd