Disk Backups (WAS Re: kit posting, what I'm working on)

[Andrew Lagodzinski]

In article <1990Dec17.165934.1407 at eci386.uucp> jmm at eci386.UUCP (John Macdonald) writes:
[Text about Diags ROM deleted]
>How about: backup and restore, which copy a disk partition to
>or from a sequence of tapes or floppies.  This allows making
>a full image backup of a system.  If needed, it can be restored
>on a blank (but formatted) disk without having to install an
>OS on the disk and then trying to not trip over itself when it
>restores over top of itself.  Restoring the root partition is
>trivial in this fashion.  I had these functions in the PROMs I
>wrote for another system.  PROM-based backup and restore are
>extremely valuable.  (It was more valuable in that system, which
>always had a 40 Meg tape drive for making the backups - they are
>a lot better than floppies for this purpose.)

I have been wondering about something similar for some time.  Can one
make a complete backup to tape of a hard disk partition using Lenny's
Boot Floppy kernal with the tape driver.  I would like to back my
whole hard disk to tape, and be able to restore the whole thing to a
blank formated disk.  I would like to skip loading the Foundation Set,
etc. 

I think this should be possible, but since I have only used my tape
drive from the UA I am not really sure how to go about this.  I think
that something like the following should do the trick, but would like
to post it here so I can be sure.  I would hate to think I had a good
backup and be SOL.

>From a floppy file system after boot using the floppy tape kernal

#mount /dev/rfp002 /mnta -r
#find /mnta -print | sort | cpio -ocB | dbuf -oT512 > /dev/rft3

Does this make any sense?  Please correct me if I am wrong.

[More on ROM based backups deleted]

Andrew


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