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From: kientzle@netcom.com
Subject: Re: Please help with upgrade-questions to FBSD-2.1
Message-ID: <kientzleDFwJJ7.KF2@netcom.com>
Keywords: FreeBSD-2.1(RELEASE), upgrade-questions
Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
References: <44mlvi$1jf@news.rz.uni-passau.de> <44pomv$rta@uriah.heep.sax.de> <44rvcj$8tf@molnir.brunel.ac.uk>
Date: Wed, 4 Oct 1995 02:13:55 GMT
Lines: 44
Sender: kientzle@netcom23.netcom.com
In article <44rvcj$8tf@molnir.brunel.ac.uk>,
Nik Clayton <Nik.Clayton@brunel.ac.uk> wrote:
>I'm looking at a Zip drive for backup purposes. It's either that or
>tape, but so far I haven't seen any reports of poeple using it with no
>problems. I'd love to be see some.
Hmmm... I was one of the people posting problem reports, most of
which were traced down to my own misunderstandings. Works beautifully
now. For the record, I'm using the SCSI-interface (aka `Mac') version
with a SB16/SCSI-2 card (AIC6360 driver).
I bought it for backups, mostly because it seemed cheaper than a decent
SCSI tape drives, and I'd heard far too many caveats about floppy tape
drives to be confident. Here are a few things I learned:
* You can re-format Mac-formatted ZIP disks to MSDOS format within
MSDOS, but it's not completely clear how to do it. Basically,
you have to first partition the disk (MSDOS thinks it's a hard
disk, apparently), then you can use the MSDOS format command to
format it. I opted to stick with MSDOS-formatted ZIP disks for
my tar backups so I could be certain to be able to recover the
data even if my FreeBSD system completely died and I had to use
something else. (Everybody can read MSDOS formatted disks, it seems.)
* Under 2.0R, to mount a hard disk which only has a single MSDOS
partition, you have to use partition `e', e.g.
mount -t msdos /dev/sd0e /dos/d:
* A colon in the filename means special things to GNU tar.
(so backing up with `tar -cvzf /dos/d:/file.tar' crashes with
a very cryptic message.)
Once I figured that out, it's wonderful. I can now quickly and
conveniently back up selected directories. I've written a short
`floppy' command that lets ordinary users mount and unmount ZIP disks
to a standard directory (/dos/d:), and it's quite convenient.
Since I'm still using 2.0R which doesn't support my CD-ROM drive,
I also use the ZIP disk as a surrogate CD-ROM, copying things with MSDOS
to the ZIP drive and then reading them from FreeBSD.
And those drives are so cute!
- Tim Kientzle