gn@orbus (06/08/91)
Last week I had a disk crash on my two month old station (400 Meg). I called
NeXT and arranged for motorola (NICE!) to come on site and replace the drive.
Previous to their arrival I backed up the old disk to three 150 meg tapes
using a Viper 150 via dump.
They arrived and swapped the disk, quick and easy. I then started to do the
restore of the disk. This is where my nightmare began.
The first tape started fine, but after about 10 minutes I noticed the NeXT
had crashed and I had to reboot the system. After rebooting I noticed
that restore and core dumped. I restarted the restore and it made it to
the point where it prompted for the next volume. I provided the second
volume, whereupon it core dumped and crashed again.
Beginning to despair, I started to use restore interactively, I marked
the entire filesystem for reloading ('add /.') and when prompted, told
restore to begin with volume two. This went fine until I was prompted
for volume three. I inserted volume three, restore queried the tape and
informed me that it was not volume three but volume two. I had two
volume twos!. I then restarted the restore and used volume three as
volume two and everything was fine.
This is a little condensed, notably I tried the 's' option of restore and
it was unable to recognize anything.
This is truly depressing, it appears as though restore is unable, for
various reasons, to handle multi-volume backups. Without the ability or
money to go to a different backup method this makes the NeXT much more
a reliability.
Greg Noel
Rathe, inc.
uunet!umn-cs!rathe!orbus!gn
"Nothing Works, and Nobody Cares." -W. Allen