maslen@LaBrea.UUCP (06/08/86)
I've inherited a PC/XT clone with two 360K floppies, a 10Mb hard disk and a
10Mb tape drive. It's fairly important to provide fast, simple backup so that
the person doing data entry is inspired to do backups at least once a day.
The tape drive claims to be an InterDyne ID1010; it comes with an installable
device driver (nice; you can treat it as a disk, albeit painfully slow),
programs called TFORMAT, TBACKUP, TRESTORE and TVERIFY (which look like hacks
to the equivalent DOS programs for floppies) and a six-page "software manual"
that lapses into Jinglish. Perhaps my problem is just one of documentation,
but it seemed that:
- TRESTORE pulls all the files off the tape. Allegedly TBACKUP writes
things so that "... the files on the tape drive may be accessed in
the same manner as a floppy disk drive in 10 megabyte volume
incriments (sic)", but I'm not sure this helps all that much.
- TBACKUP couldn't fit all of my 10Mb disk on one tape, although "each
reel has the (sic) formatted capacity of 10.48 megabytes" (and I
thought I told it only to write real files, not the whole disk
drive, but maybe I'm deluded).
- twenty minutes (minimum) feels like a long time to back up a
not-very-full 10Mb disk; the person who does the data entry would
rather go home. Does it really take that long to write the tape if
you access it intelligently (i.e. don't seek forward and back all
the time)?
So...
* Does anyone out there have one of these tape drives and put it to
good use (if so, how?)
* Is there any good general-purpose backup software, either public
domain or commercial, that might do the trick? I've seen IBU and
it's nice, but interactiveness is not really what we want.
Something more like (Berkeley?) Unix /etc/dump would be great.
("dump all the files that have changed since the last level 9 dump")
Something that knew it was dealing with a tape drive, and optimized
its block usage accordingly, would also be great. Intelligent
management of subdirectories is essential; other goodies, such as
compression, would be nice but aren't vital.
Replies to me - I'll try not to pollute the net unless lots of people voice
their interest.
Thanks in advance,
Thomas Maslen.
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