D'oh! Backup issue solved

From: Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner <spc_at_armigeron.com>
Date: Sat Sep 2 23:04:55 2000

It was thus said that the Great Richard Erlacher once stated:
>
> Yes, that would be a nice feature, but I'd be satisfied for starters with
> ANY Win9x-based utility that actually would provide a no-nonsense backup
> procedure, one that would recognize that it formatted the tape, one that
> would follow its own schedule and would recognize the same tape each time it
> was in the drive. I'd like it to start within 1 minute of when it's invoked
> when running on a 150 MHz machine, and that wouldn't ask me more than once
> if REALLY want to do what I just typed. I'd like it to go ahead and back up
> the files it can back up and skip the ones it can't, without human
> intervention, and NEVER create new files that subsequently require it be
> manually instructed, file by file, not to back up the files the program
> itself created in order to perform the backup, all of which are, of course.
> open. When I'm using a 20-tape library, I'd prefer it NOT ask for
> permission to use the next tape, and, having gotten that perimssion, I'd
> prefer it not ask again before overwriting the tape. I'd prefer it be able
> to read the backup it wrote yesterday, and I'd be happy if it could
> recognize the tape it just formatted.

  If you can, try to get the Cygnus GNU package for Windows, which includes
tar (stands for Tape ARchive). A friend of mine had to back up something
like 40 or 50g worth of data and the program he was using on NT would stop
at the first file it couldn't read and require human intervention (and even
then, it refused to continue). After several attempts at a workaround, we
gave up, installed tar and while it couldn't communicate with the tape
drive, we did manage to backup the data onto another drive (in our case, we
had one local) and tar basically skipped the files it couldn't read (which
is what we really needed).

> If there were even one program that really would work, producing unattended
> backups of the whole system over the LAN every day, assuming there's enough
> bandwidth on its 100Mb channel, I'd use it. I've bought a half dozen
> different vendors' offerings, and half of them don't even run, let alone
> perform backups.

  Install one of the free Unix systems (Linux, *BSD) on an older box, slap
Samba on it, and use the Unix backup systems. Might actually work and it'll
definitely be cheaper.

  -spc (Of course, run the fvwm95 window manager under X and many won't
        notice it's not NT ... 8-)
Received on Sat Sep 02 2000 - 23:04:55 BST

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