[Gllug] backup solution

Ian Northeast ian at house-from-hell.demon.co.uk
Thu Jul 10 20:48:33 UTC 2003


Gordon Joly wrote:
> 
> At 22:40 +0100 2003/07/08, Doug Winter wrote:
> >
> >The only problem I found with it is that the things you back up
> >(generally partitions) need to be smaller than a single tape.  There's
> >some kind of project in the works to remove this limitation, but I can
> >quite imagine this requires some significant rearchitecture.
> 
> Quite amazing.
> 
> I am sure that 20 years ago putting a single partition across multiple tapes cartridges was common.... using "dump" and "restore"
> 
> Maybe I am inventing something in my brain??

/common/universal/ IME.

20 years ago was 1983 when a typical tape contained about 250MB. Disks,
at least on "proper" machines, were a bit bigger than that so a backup
of a disk (partitions being unknown then, at least on the sort of
machines I used) typically used 2-3 tapes.

IIRC in the early days of commercial UNIX systems, in the late '80s,
cpio used to be preferred to tar for backups because it supported
multiple tapes and tar didn't. This isn't true any more, at least not
for GNU tar. My memory of dump and restore from those days is a little
hazy but I believe that you are correct.

At home I like to keep my backups down to 1 tape as I run them in the
middle of the night from cron so changing tapes isn't viable. At work we
have tape mounting robots and highly sophisticated backup software
(Tivoli TSM). In the '80s we had hordes of operators on shift allowance
and most of them were in the pub. And yes, the pub was open, the
landlord knew what was good for his income and the police, if they gave
a s**t, were also in the pub. Ah, the East End in the '80s..

Regards, Ian

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