Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!virtech!cpcahil
From: cpcahil@virtech.uucp (Conor P. Cahill)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Tape backups and Disk management
Message-ID: <1990Mar2.134004.23530@virtech.uucp>
Date: 2 Mar 90 13:40:04 GMT
References: <9782@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> <12217@smoke.BRL.MIL> <1990Mar1.062015.13739@chinet.chi.il.us>
Reply-To: cpcahil@virtech.UUCP (Conor P. Cahill)
Organization: Virtual Technologies Inc., Sterling VA
Lines: 23

In article <1990Mar1.062015.13739@chinet.chi.il.us> les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) writes:
>What is the SysV equivalent?  How do you do it to the root (possibly only)
>filesystem.  Is it save to restore it back to a different disk drive (I'm
>thinking about the '386 style /etc/partitions file here)?  Is there any
>way to use dcopy without having a spare identical partition (i.e over
>RFS or to tape, then back)?

For any system, be it system V or BSD, the way to handle this is to make
root very small so that it only contains required directories (/bin, /etc,
/lib) and place the rest of the stuff onto other file systems. This
makes your root directory fairly static and therefore reduces, if not
elimates, any fragmentation.  Another good side effect is that the smaller
and more static that the root device is, the less likely that you 
will have file system problems on that partition.

If you still need to defragment root, you must make a backup copy, reboot
the system on another device (floppy for your 386 example) from that 
device, mkfs, restore, shutdown and reboot.
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