A better floppy backup (was Re: Corrupted backup floppies from cpio)

[Jon Zeeff]

In article <118 at twwells.uucp> bill at twwells.UUCP (T. William Wells) writes:
>You are so right.  In fact, I haven't seen anything that meets my
>requirements for floppy backup so I am writing one.
>

Here are some things I'd like to see in a backup program.  Your program
evidently has some of them.

1) True error correction like Fastback.  I can punch a hole in a Fastback
disk and still get *all* my files back.

2) When I back up, I use
     cd /
     find . -print | sort > backup.list
     cpio -ocv < backup.list | ...

   It would be nice if the program created a new list file that had lines
   "** Disk 2 starts here".  I could then look at the list to tell me what
   floppy a file is on.

4) A verify option that reads back each disk after writing it.

5) A check for out of sequence floppies.  Let's say I'm backing up and 
the program asks me to put in the next floppy and hit return.  I accidently
hit return before switching.  Will the program respond "That looks like the
same disk - continue anyway?".

6) cpio or tar compatible output would be nice.  We don't need a new
standard.

7) The ability to seek past errors and continue.  Sometimes when you get an
error you can't get the raw device to read past it.

8) Individual file compression (ie, compress each large file before storing 
it vs compressing the whole archive).  Then I lose only one file 
instead of the entire remainder of the archive.  

I suspect that you can do most of what you want with just a front-end 
for cpio.  

-- 
Jon Zeeff      			Ann Arbor, MI
umix!b-tech!zeeff  		zeeff at b-tech.ann-arbor.mi.us