*BSD News Article 10609


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	id AA372 ; Sun, 31 Jan 93 14:05:09 EST
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!agate!ames!pacbell.com!UB.com!quack!dfox
From: dfox@quack.sac.ca.us (David Fox)
Subject: Re: Does anybody have a complete tar.Z file of filesystem?
Message-ID: <fYIR9dY@quack.sac.ca.us>
Organization: The Duck Pond public unix: +1 408 249 9630, log in as 'guest'.
References: <wagner.985.728099462@main.mndly.umn.edu> <1993Jan29.161226.966@sci34hub.sci.com> <fYFNcUt@quack.sac.ca.us> <1993Jan31.115936.24290@pilhuhn.ka.sub.org>
Date: 31 Jan 1993 21:19:13 UTC
Lines: 46

In article <1993Jan31.115936.24290@pilhuhn.ka.sub.org> hwr@pilhuhn.ka.sub.org (Heiko W.Rupp) writes:
>dfox@quack.sac.ca.us (David Fox) writes:
>>my disk is hosed, I should hope I could restore the floppies.  But since
>>the /dev entries are special files, what should I do about them?  Switch
>>to 'cpio' for backups?
>
>try dump(8) and restore(8).

No thank you. :)  I tried dump first since it was there, and it was the
easiest to figure out how to operate correctly when I first put 386bsd on
the system.  The problems were that it wouldn't compress, and each time a new
disk was requested, it would fork off a new process.  Eventually, after many
disks were written, my loadavg would skyrocket (a symptom that I've run out
of RAM) and I'd be forced to reboot.

Right now I use a program called 'backflops' (came from a Linux system, easy
to convert to 386bsd btw) that makes for a painless interface to 'tar' to write
multiple compressed floppies.

However, I've done some experimentation since I saw the articles about 'tar'
not working with /dev/* here and on another Unix conference (RIME).  So far,
I am not convinced that this is a problem.  Executing 'tar -cvf dev.tar /dev/*'
produced a tar archive all right, and it looked quite reasonable when I
did a 'tar -tvf' on it.

Whether it will restore it is something else, and I haven't tried that yet.
But I don't see any reason why it wouldn't.  The statement 'Why not? Because
it's a special file' or some such doesn't wash.

>Heiko W.Rupp  Gerwigstr.5  7500 Kh'e 1  hwr@pilhuhn.ka.sub.org  +49 721 693642
>The Abrams' Principle:
>	The shortest distance between two points is off the wall.





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in real life: david fox            email: dfox@quack.sac.ca.us
5479 Castle Manor Drive,                  
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