[comp.sys.next] Exabyte Tape

stan@toaster.SFSU.EDU (Stan Osborne) (11/14/89)

The first real use of our Exabyte was to backup one of
our 330Mb disk systems.

The dump parameters I used to backup up this system were:

   /usr/etc/dump 0fusd /dev/rxt0 32000 6250 /dev/sd0a

The disk had about 275863 Kbytes in use.  Dump said it would
take about 13% of one tape to do the backup. It took 26 minutes
to complete the backup.  This works to be about 176 Kbytes/second.
(This is only use of dump.  After a little more use we should
find out if this close to the norm for NeXT's.)

Also tried were "mt" and "tar".  Both worked as one would expect.

Would other Exabyte users care to describe their findings?

Has anyone built a modified version of dump/restore that uses
a tape block size larger than the 8KB standard?   (8K is still 
the standard size, is it no?) Would this improve backup performance?

-- 
Stan Osborne, Computer Science Department, San Francisco State University
Internet: stan@cs.sfsu.edu    Usenet: cshub!stan    Voice: (415) 338-2168