chaiklin@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (Seth Chaiklin) (07/25/90)
I have been learning to use afio to do backups to tape cartridges. One of the options is -c to set the number of buffers to use. The man page recommends a "large number" when using a streaming tape backup, but it does not specify a specific value. I am curious/interested in recommendations. Also, I thought that it was possible to do multi-volume backups with afio, but I did not succeed with a "cat filelist|afio -o -f -s59m /dev/tape" I am running SCO Xenix/386 2.3.1 and an Everex (Wangtek) 60 Mb drive. Thanks for the advice. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Seth Chaiklin Institute for Learning Technologies (212) 678-3899 Box 8, Teachers College, Columbia University, NYC 10027 INTERNET: chaiklin@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu UUCP: seth@ny-yn ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
caf@omen.UUCP (WA7KGX) (07/28/90)
Here's a command I use. The /tmp/DONE business assures that all the files get on the tape even if the south end gets wasted. cp /etc/termcap /tmp/DONE date >/tmp/today find /tmp/today . /tmp/DONE -print | /u/caf/bin/afio -ovzb 32k -s 62m /dev/rct0 tape status tape rewind The real buffering is in the tape driver. SCO 3.2 makes the tape stream most of the time, except for directories with zillions of tiny files. Xenix FS is slower; try using a 1 meg buffer so the tape doesn't backup so often.