[comp.sys.sun] How big will tonight's dump be?

olling@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu (Cliff Olling) (01/14/89)

For those of us with backup devices with much smaller capacities then our
our disks (and no budget to improve things), it is certainly useful to be
able to determine in advance how big a dump of a particular filesystem is
going to be.

It was recently pointed out to me that the ULTRIX dump program has an
option ("S") which does just this.  I think this would be more useful than
using "find ... -newer|-atime -ls", etc., as there seems to be little
relationship between the sum of the sizes of the files that find returns
and the size of a dump.

Is there a better way to determine dump size than dumping to /dev/null
before doing the real thing?

The relevant portion of the Ultrix dump man page is excerpted below:

===============================================================================
     S       Prints output file size in bytes, or number of
             volumes for devices.  See the third example.

     This example reports number of bytes to be output for a
     level 0 dump of the root file system. Please note: the file
     test is not created.

          dump 0Sf test /
===============================================================================

Clifford Olling, olling@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu, Cornell University
Modern Languages and Linguistics	Operations Research and Industrial Eng.
cornell!plab!olling			olling@orie.cornell.edu