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From: Peter Mutsaers <plm@lucent.com>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: dump and compression
Date: 24 Mar 1997 11:04:09 +0100
Organization: Lucent Technologies, Indian Hill
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>> On 23 Mar 1997 19:42:38 GMT, j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) said:
JW> In particular, if dump would do it on a per file basis (per i-node,
JW> more exactly), as opposed to applying it to the output stream. This
JW> way, if you encounter a medium error, only one file is lost, not the
JW> remainder of the entire dump.
This is exactly how afio does it (a modifed cpio).
Also, you can tell afio not to compress certain files (such as those
ending in extensions like .gif or .gz, or below a certain size). This
prevents compressing small files or files that are already compressed.
The Linux program tob is quite nice and I will try to use it on
FreeBSD. It is a shell script that writes headers on tapes (so you can
see the contents of a tape quickly) followed by a dump of the
filesystem through afio, or whatever you like (e.g. tar, cpio). It
also keeps an administration for you so you can see very quickly on
what tape you can find a file that you want to restore, and also to
handle incremental backups.
This gives you the features of restore/dump but also nicer tape
administration and compression. You can restore using only mt and afio
(or tar, cpio) in an emergency situation. (You need mt to skip the
header). Only problem for me is that it is hard to create a FreeBSD
boot/fixit floppy (I'd need one that contains afio of course).
--
Peter Mutsaers Lucent Technologies, Network Systems
plm@lucent.com Huizen, the Netherlands