TAR and CPIO (Was:Re: SCSI tape drive)

[Jim Jagielski]

In article <1990Nov14.104544.14142 at panix.uucp> alexis at panix.uucp (Alexis Rosen) writes:
>
>The problem is, "working" doesn't mean "releasable". Tar and cpio will fail
>with any large job (trivial ones work). Dump and restore work, but I've seen
>problems there too- restore not wanting to restore and suchlike.
>


I've heard a number of times that tar and cpio "fail" with large jobs... what
is meant by "fail"? During the backup? During the restore? Too many files?
Files too big? Too many links (symbolic or otherwise)?

My system is relatively medium in size :

/             53398 blocks used of  102508 total. (52.09%):   /dev/dsk/c0d0s0
/usr2         59426 blocks used of  154418 total. (38.48%):   /dev/dsk/c5d0s3
/usr          71524 blocks used of  190782 total. (37.49%):   /dev/dsk/c0d0s2

and I backup each partition using cpio and the st driver. I've not hit a
snag yet when backing-up and have not required extensive restoring yet, all-
though I have done a cpio -pdmuv from /usr2 to /usr/usr2 when I reformatted
/usr2 to BSD Fast File (after I updated to 2.0) and then back again to /usr2
without problems (/ and /usr are on a Wren 170, /usr2 is Quantum 80).

Have I been lucky or haven't I reached the size limit yet?

By the way, isn't A/UX distributed in cpio format? Therefore, cpio must be
able to restore A/UX entirely from the distribution medium... true, it's
less than 50Megs, but I wouldn't call it "trivial".

Anyone know if any of the 3rd party tar/cpio replacements ("CTar", "LoneTar"(?)
) have been ported to A/UX?

Finally, what about pax?
--
=======================================================================
#include <std/disclaimer.h>
                                 =:^)
           Jim Jagielski                    NASA/GSFC, Code 711.1
     jim at jagubox.gsfc.nasa.gov               Greenbelt, MD 20771

"Kilimanjaro is a pretty tricky climb. Most of it's up, until you reach
 the very, very top, and then it tends to slope away rather sharply."