Date: 13 Jan 2002 16:52:37 -0800 From: swear@blarg.net (Gary W. Swearingen) To: "Brian T. Schellenberger" <bts@babbleon.org> Cc: Kevin Brunelle <frobbnicate42@yahoo.com>, questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: HOWTO -- backup onto CDRs? Message-ID: <b18zb1ycru.zb1@localhost.localdomain> In-Reply-To: <0eb4b3629220d12FE4@mail4.nc.rr.com> References: <20020113042510.87902.qmail@web10402.mail.yahoo.com> <0ed70exd19.70e@localhost.localdomain> <0eb4b3629220d12FE4@mail4.nc.rr.com>
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"Brian T. Schellenberger" <bts@babbleon.org> writes: > They are all ways of putting bits on CDs; I can't imagine why one would work > without bugs are more or less than the other. Because different program developers have different levels of carefulness in design, implementation, and testing. Or a program might have been designed for one kind of operating system and file system and pressed into service on another without adequate review and testing. The obvious problem is that they don't all put the correct bits on the CD or are not able to put the correct bits back down on the hard disk. There was a famous experiment from ten years ago which tested multiple archivers and found them all (IIRC) with several problems. Probably because dump/restore work at the lowest level, they had the fewest (or no) bugs. Presumably, the others have been improved, but many people don't trust them. I, for instance, have noticed that "tar" belches error messages on some FreeBSD /dev entries with too-large node numbers. (I asked about that here, and got ignored, but I've since seen another mention of that as a problem.) I think I've seen other problems with cpio and tar which didn't seem to be hardware errors, but I'm not sure. > It is helpful to verify a CD just after writing, though. (My cdbackup > program--for which I already have enough testers, thanks, but I hope to > release it in a week or two if all goes well--is capable of doing this, FWIW.) That only verifies that the CD bits are on the hard disk; not that all of the necessary hard disk bits are on the CD and not that the bits can be restored to the disk properly and not that your verify was bug-free. Some people choose to reduce their risks in recovering costly data at the small cost, if any, of a little inconvenience in using dump/restore. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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