From: imp@boulder.parcplace.com (Warner Losh) Subject: Re: where is dump? Date: Sun, 15 Aug 1993 04:47:16 GMT
In article <1993Aug14.225200.2231@kf8nh.wariat.org>
bsa@kf8nh.wariat.org (Brandon S. Allbery) writes:
>This can save your *ss if something from half a year ago needs to be restored
>from tape for some reason. (It happened to me once.) But, from the same
>period, keeping track of what tape/dump level to use on what day is a bit of
>a problem, because days/weeks/months just don't fit into powers of 2 too well.
That is what tape labels are for :-)
Also, your tape limits assume that the entire backup will fit on one
tape, which may or may not be the case. It is the case for me since I
have a 525M tape drive and a 250M hard disk. However, at work, the
situation is reversed since we have about 10G of disk and two 1.3G
tape drives. It would take 10 tapes to do a level 0, and 3 or 4 to do
level n backups if we were to backup everything all the time.
Fortunately, some of the larger partitions need not be backed up all
the time (like where we do releases, since they are completely
recoverable).
I'd love to see dump/restore on Linux. They are cryptic, hard to
understand and difficult to master. However, they do the job quite
well. And many places have improved them. For example, Solbourne
ships (or used to ship) dump that works on live file systems and
allows you to define your own media types so you needn't have a string
of odd numbers in your dump command line. There are many things that
can be done to make dump/restore more friendly. I have an OI program
that acts as a front end to dump that I used for a long time to backup
my personal workstation (with the live fs patches and media
definitions, it was a simple matter).
Anyway, gnu tar does do a good enough job for what I need it for. I
don't even bother with daily backups that are just deltas. I make a
full backup every day or three and every month or so make a level 0
backup tape that I use to keep a snapshot of what I had so if I need
it later, I can go back to it. I wonder how things will work when I
have a year or twos worth of backups to deal with.
Warner
-- Warner Losh imp@boulder.parcplace.COM ParcPlace Boulder I've almost finished my brute force solution to subtlety.