Re: Backup media; comments would be appreciated.
From: Richard Steven Hack (richardhack_at_prontomail.com)
Date: 01/02/04
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Date: Fri, 02 Jan 2004 03:05:23 GMT
On Thu, 01 Jan 2004 02:06:41 GMT, John Thompson
<john@starfleet.os2.dhs.org> wrote:
>On 2003-12-27, Richard Steven Hack <richardhack@prontomail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 27 Dec 2003 02:28:16 GMT, Richard Steven Hack
>><richardhack@prontomail.com> wrote:
>
>> Just like Windows, there are no adequate (free) backup tools for Linux
>> that automate the process adequarely.
>
>Dump/restore work quite well. With the help of a perl script and a
>cron job you can automatically dump your filesystems to tape at whatever
>interval suits you. Then all you have to do is remember to change the
>tape before it fills completely. I can get about 3 weeks worth of backups
>onto a single DLT3 tape.
Unfortunately I can't afford tape systems at the moment, even used as
another poster suggests.
Also dump/restore have problems as Linus himself has mentioned.
I just played around with KonCD and k3b (an older version for Red Hat
V7.3) last night and was not happy with either. K3b's setup screen
was too big to fit my 800x600 resolution and I could not even resize
the thing to fit. Then it detected my cdrecord and cdrdao programs,
but refused to use them later when trying to burn.
These are all irritating problems which I'm sure I can solve once I
upgrade various portions of my system to newer versions of installed
apps.
But for now, it looks like a good ol' Bash script and mkisofs and
cdrecord from the command line are the only way to get files backed up
that do not rely on various fragile archive formats or
not-ready-for-prime-time burner apps.
One major problem is the incredibly stupid iso9660 limitation of 31
characters for file names. What genius thought that one up? Back
when iso9660 was first proposed, hard disks weren't that big and a CD
was considered bulk storage. So why the hell did these idiots settle
on a lousy 31 characters when UNIX was well-known to allow more?
On my system, there is usually at least several files that don't
truncate to unique names and a couple very short files that don't
either. This is one reason for going with an archive format backup -
to conceal file names from the idiotic iso9660 file system. Even
Joliet and Rockridge extensions do not solve the problem.
The problem is archive reads fail when there is bad read on the CD
media. And the whole archive is lost, instead of just one file.
The only solution I see at the moment for this is PAR files, as used
by the Disk ARchive utility. But I don't like DAR because it uses a
non-standard archive format. So I guess it will be back to tar with
the added use of PAR files to insure recovery of damaged archives.
Time to start scripting my own backup utility.
-- Richard Steven Hack "Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger" - and YOU have not killed me!
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