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

[Jim Jagielski]

In article <1990Nov18.095917.1746 at panix.uucp> alexis at panix.uucp (Alexis Rosen) writes:
>jim at jagubox.gsfc.nasa.gov (Jim Jagielski) writes:
>>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.
>>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
>>
>>Have I been lucky or haven't I reached the size limit yet?
>
>First of all, this problem only seems to happen with tapes. cpio -p has always
>worked for me, with consideerably larger things than your /usr2.
>As for backing up something that size, I haven't tried it. The author says,
>st _does_ fail. I'm not interested in finding out that I'm the exception
>_after_ I need to restore. However, to be honest, it's supposed to crash
>during backup. I don't know why yours hasn't. Perhaps a chat with MicroNet
>will clear things up. I'll call them monday...
>

Now I have backed up the above partitions using st and cpio and have not
had any problems. The times that I've needed to snag an old copy of something
I've, once again, not hit a problem.

If cpio -p and cpio -o to DISK work, but cpio -o to TAPE doesn't, then I would
suspect the tape driver. As you said, the author says "st _does_ fail", but
does it fail because of the drivers or because something cpio/tar does that
st doesn't like.

In other words, I'm kinda confused. If it's tar/cpio which is bad, then I can
use Gnu-stuff, which I hope works. But if it's _st_, then maybe it doesn't
matter WHAT backup utility I use... what's the word??
--
=======================================================================
#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."