Backup recommendations sought

[Brian Hackworth]

In article <3597 at syma.sussex.ac.uk>, jeremym at syma.sussex.ac.uk (Jeremy
Maris) writes:

|> Three questions:
|> 
|> 	1) What do people use for multiple dumps to Exabyte ?

An enhanced version of dump(1M) that handles physical EOT.
We put a crude table of contents at the front of the tape
listing the names of the file systems on the tape.  Then
we invoke the enhanced dump for each file system, each
time writing to the no-rewind tape device.

|> 	2) Are there any fancy interfaces to restor to allow 
|> 	   easy restoration of a directory tree ?

No need for a fancy interface.  Check out restore(1M)'s "x"
flag to extract only named files.  If the "named file" is 
a directory, the directory and all its contents are recursively
extracted.  This sounds like what you're asking for.  The "i"
interactive flag is also handy for recovering only a few
files -- in allows you to "cd" around the dump tape, 
selecting only the files or directories you want to extract.

The only tricky part is figuring out the correct file system
for the directory you're interested in, and spacing around
the tape to find the start of that file system.

|> 	3) Is there anything with the flexibilty and robustness of
|> 	   VMS Backup available for Ultrix/Un*x  ( ie journal
files,checksums,
|> 	   redundancy, a gogol of selection options) ?

I don't know anything about VMS Backup.  Journal files are
trivial to create if you're writing a shell script around
dump and restore.  dump already performs checksums.  dump
and restore don't do software redundancy, but most new
tape drives support some sort of error detection to let
you know if you haven't really saved what you thought you saved.
I'm not sure how useful a gogol of selection options are;
the dump model of backing up all that has changed since
the last backup seems to be pretty reasonable.

--
Brian Hackworth
Data General Corporation            hackworth at dg-rtp.dg.com
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