malpass@LL-VLSI.ARPA (Don Malpass) (05/02/88)
Does a disk backup program using arc format exist? It would have to march recursively through a directory tree, clone the tree (up to the top branches) on the target disk, and presumably put all files from a given directory "xyz" into a file called "xyz.arc". Something intelligent would have to be done for the two special cases in which a directory name DID use a file extension (which lots of us don't, but which is not prohibited) or in which directory xyz already contained a file called xyz.arc. I think arc can get upset by recursive entries when it tries to unarc. Alternately, it could clone the entire tree and dump all the files of each subdirectory into "allfiles.arc" placed in every subdirectory. (That sounds like a better system, now that I think about it.) Even without a RESTORE program this would be useful since PKFIND is so handy for finding needed files. A restore program could come later since there IS some necessity for restoring a complete hard disk after reformatting it, and doing it manually would be a pain, but for individual files, pkfind is great. Now that I am blessed with an ethernet connection to a Sun and relatively painless backup provision I would like to halve the file space in the Sun that my monthly backup takes. But it also strikes me that backup to floppy would be much better if it were done in .arc format. It might take more computer time, but the time spent feeding it disks would be cut down a lot. I haven't given any thought to what should be done when an .arc being created runs out of disk space. As far as I know, there is no way to use FASTBACK with an HZ-100, but if I'm wrong about that I'd like to know that too. don [malpass@LL-vlsi]
marria@polya.STANFORD.EDU (Michael R. Marria) (05/02/88)
In article <8805021419.AA10001@ll-vlsi.arpa> malpass@LL-VLSI.ARPA (Don Malpass) writes: > > Now that I am blessed with an ethernet connection to a Sun and >relatively painless backup provision I would like to halve the file >space in the Sun that my monthly backup takes. But it also strikes me I would like to hear about the ethernet connection you have. Assuming you are talking about the Z100, what board have you installed? Is it on the s100 bus? Are you running ncsa type software or something special? Thanks, Michael
paula@bcsaic.UUCP (Paul Allen) (05/06/88)
In article <8805021419.AA10001@ll-vlsi.arpa> malpass@LL-VLSI.ARPA (Don Malpass) writes: > > Does a disk backup program using arc format exist? It would >have to march recursively through a directory tree, clone the >tree (up to the top branches) on the target disk, and presumably put >all files from a given directory "xyz" into a file called "xyz.arc". Why not use zoo? It understands directories. It generates archives that are portable between *all* systems you might be interested in. It's roughly as fast as pkarc and compresses roughly as small as pkarc. It's been posted to the net at least three times that I've seen. It's FREE. The zoo sources are freely available. Zoo does everything that pkarc or arc do and more. In a posting last year, zoo's author (Rahul Dhesi) offered to send people zoo if they would send him a floppy and a stamped addressed mailer. He also made zoo available via anonymous uucp. You can contact him at uunet!bsu-cs!dhesi or dhesi%bsu-cs@uunet.uu.net. People who are on the arpanet can probably get zoo from simtel. I haven't checked because I snarfed it from Usenet, but I would imagine it's there. A couple notes: To archive directory hierarchies with zoo, you need to feed it a list of pathnames on standard input. My Zenith MSDOS has a 'search' command that can be used to generate this list. I'm thinking about a program that would generate a list of all the files that don't have the archived bit set, and then set the bit. On UNIX, you would use 'find'. PCDOS probably has something similar. Zoo doesn't yet understand multi-floppy archives. If you are writing the archive on a hard disk or NFS partition, this isn't a problem. *BEGIN OPINION* Hey! ZOO IS BETTER THAN ARC! We would all be better off if we started using it! 'Nuff said! *END OPINION* Paul Allen -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Paul L. Allen | paula@boeing.com Boeing Advanced Technology Center | ...!uw-beaver!ssc-vax!bcsaic!paula
malpass@LL-VLSI.ARPA (Don Malpass) (05/12/88)
Paul, Many thanks for the ZOO info. I've been more-or-less aware of it for a while, but have not taken the trouble yet (which is strange since I work in such a zoo). I'll get on it as soon as I get off the beach in the Virgin Islands. Meanwhile I'll get my local UNIX guru that I'm interested - he's the one who brought it up in the past, so he may already have it available on some of the unix systems I use. Thanks again. don [malpass@LL-vlsi.arpa]