On Mon, 20 Sep 1999, Douglas Bollinger wrote:
> First off, tar doesn't recognize anything about the position of the tape; it
> simply dumps the data stream to the tape drive.
This is what I was expecting.
> I'm not sure how big your tape is or how much you are archiving, but the way
> you are using tar would backup needless things like the /proc and /tmp
> directories, which could account for more tape usage than you are expecting.
> Here's how I use tar:
I df to determine how much room I need. Only 2.9 gigs are on the drives
right now, but there is a max capacity of 6. I want to setup a backup
system so that we never need to worry about suddenly switching over to
compression.
> Second, and most importantly, is that using compression
> on a tar backup could result in total data loss in a archive after a bad
> spot in the tape, whereas going without compression should only result in
> losing the file with the bad tape sector.
How easy are these other backup systems to implement? Are any of them Open
Source like tar? The advantage of tarballs is that any linux box can read
them.
Thanks,
Nathan
vividworks.com
