Best way to backup SCO Xenix/UNIX

[Anthony DeBoer]

In article <1991Apr7.044627.5298 at ucselx.sdsu.edu> aty at ucselx.sdsu.edu (young a t) writes:
>Got to be careful with this.  We recently had the disk controller crash
>on our 3B2 system, which had been backed up with cpio as you describe.
>The disks we lost had all the users' home directories.  So we said,
>OK, we'll just restore those guys on the SUN workstation from the
>backup tapes, right?  Wrong.  The SUN version of cpio can't read
>multi-volume backups; we only saved the guys who were on the first
>tape.  There are probably other Berkeley-derived systems whose cpio
>can only read one tape.  BEWARE!

>From a lot of experiences in our shop restoring backups on machines other
than the one that made them, or of needing one file from the fifth tape of
a set, my conclusion is that multi-tape backups are evil.

What I've started using is a small program that acts something like the C-News
batcher, generating backup lists each containing no more than a certain number
of megs worth of data, and then backing up each list to a single tape.  That
way I can restore all or part of any individual tape independently, I'm not
completely dead in the water if tape two dies, and I don't have to worry about
differing end-of-tape continuation implementations.

Any other views on this area?
-- 
Anthony DeBoer NAUI#Z8800 | adeboer at gjetor.geac.com   | Programmer (n): One who
Geac J&E Systems Ltd.     | uunet!geac!gjetor!adeboer | makes the lies the 
Toronto, Ontario, Canada  | #include <disclaimer.h>   | salesman told come true.