Re: Backup media; comments would be appreciated.

From: Richard Steven Hack (richardhack_at_prontomail.com)
Date: 12/27/03 

Date: Sat, 27 Dec 2003 11:09:18 GMT

On Sat, 27 Dec 2003 02:28:16 GMT, Richard Steven Hack
<richardhack@prontomail.com> wrote:

>Another tool which I think meets my needs (as an alternative to Dar)
>is Sitback. From the Specifications page of the home page:

I spoke too soon. Unfortunately SitBack has a couple of problems, at
least as far as being able to handle my needs.

First, you can't make multiple volume backups if you do not use a tar
archive. You can back up masses of files but they all have to fit on
one CD. This makes no sense. If you have the logic in place to
prompt for media inserts for archives, I don't see why you can't
prompt for non-archived file collections - you just have to count file
sizes until you hit 650MB or whatever, and prompt. I wrote a script
for a class project last semester that did that for floppies. It's not
rocket science.

Secondly, tar V1.13 has a bug with the tape-length parameter, so
SitBack will not use if you specify the VOLUMELENGTH parameter in
Sitback's config file - it suggests you downgrade to tar 1.12. I did
that and managed to burn a 2-CD tar archive.

On using tar to list the archive from the CD, the second CD read all
right. The first encountered an "unexpected EOF" near the end of the
first CD and exited with an unrecoverable error. This is precisely
why I don't like using archives on unreliable media.

If you're comfortable burning archives to CDs and assume you'll never
have a read error, I suppose SitBack is quite useful.

For me, I'm going to have to look at Dar - but I'm concerned that that
uses a non-standard archive format. At least it makes an effort (with
PAR files and a recoverable copy utility) to deal with CD errors. But
I suspect I'm going to end up doing finds and pipes to mkisofs and
cdrecord in order to copy bare files to CDs as I am forced to do on
the WIndows side of my machine.

Just like Windows, there are no adequate (free) backup tools for Linux
that automate the process adequarely. 

-- 
Richard Steven Hack
"Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger" - 
and YOU have not killed me!

Relevant Pages