Best way to backup SCO Xenix/UNIX

[young a t]

In article <5664 at vela.acs.oakland.edu> srodawa at vela.acs.oakland.edu (Ron Srodawa) writes:
>In article <1991Apr3.121959.627 at cynic.wimsey.bc.ca> curt at cynic.wimsey.bc.ca (Curt J. Sampson) writes:
>>I think that cpio is the best of the standard utilities for backup for
>>the following reasons:
>>
	(much stuff deleted)
>
>Cpio is extremely flexible.  If you use the -c option, systems other
>than Xenix can process the files.  This is especially useful when
>your Xenix box has big brothers down the hall.  I am backing up
>to a tapedrive on a machine down the hall with something like..


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!

		-- A.T.Young (aty at mintaka.sdsu.edu)