[unix-pc.general] full-system backups

brant@manta.UUCP (Brant Cheikes) (12/30/87)

What do people use to do full system backups?  More specifically, how
do you do a full backup without spending an entire afternoon feeding
floppies to your 3b1?  Please-- forget the tape drive; I agree it's the
best idea, but it's too expensive.

What is really needed is a multi-volume "tar" or "cpio" with
compression.  I have the ccpio/unccpio shell scripts, but (a) that's
appallingly slow, since ccpio has to re-read each floppy after
writing, and (b) I've been burned at least three times so far, with
ccpio creating archives that were later unreadable (even though the
disks were good).  There must be a better way.

So-- has anyone found a satisfactory backup mechanism?  Is there a PD
tar or cpio-like program that has the desired features?
-- 
Brant Cheikes
University of Pennsylvania
Department of Computer and Information Science
ARPA: brant@linc.cis.upenn.edu, UUCP: ...drexel!manta!brant