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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!msuinfo!agate!parker.EECS.Berkeley.EDU!not-for-mail From: alanp@parker.EECS.Berkeley.EDU (Alan Pearson) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Subject: How do people without tapes do backups? Date: 16 May 1994 03:09:46 -0700 Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 26 Message-ID: <2r7gpa$9v3@parker.EECS.Berkeley.EDU> NNTP-Posting-Host: parker.eecs.berkeley.edu I dont have a tape drive, but have 2 pretty large hard disks (420MB and 340MB). I just installed the 420, so there's lots of free space and I can do my backups by tarring entire filesystems to a file (with the -z option to get compressed tars) and then splitting them and writing the split files to disks. This is a pain in the butt, but I can't see a better way since dumpfs and "tar cMf /dev/fd0a" don't do compression so I would need about 200 disketts. Forget that. It's bad enough as it is. Anyone know of programs that do compressed backups? I ran across a program that tried to do this but was very, very, unreliable. It started tar and gzip as children and put the output of them to /dev/fd0a, but frequently there would be a hard write error, and the program would halt instead of trying to recover. After doing 20 disks, and the program halting and then having to start over from scratch, I gave up. This guy's program is no longer on my machine. Alternately, are there drivers for any of the myriad of tape devices that patch into the floppy port? I see that SCSI drives are supported but I have IDE, and buying a SCSI controller plus a SCSI tape drive (which is often 3x the price of the floppy-based tape drives) is way too much. Probably more than $500. thanks. -- alan pearson alanp@cory.eecs.berkeley.edu UC Berkeley EECS