SUMMARY: Backup while in multi-user mode

[Leslie Mikesell]

In article <W3KBZID at xds13.ferranti.com> peter at ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) writes:

>Yes, but cpio doesn't produce a bad archive when it gets out of sync.

It doesn't die if files have been deleted, but some very nasty things
happen if a file is truncated between the time cpio generates its
header and when it actually reads the file.  I think most versions
even get confused if the file grows in this interval (i.e. they put
the data to EOF in the archive even if it is not consistant with the
header length field.).

>We're on a network that provides transparent UNIX file system semantics
>on remote hosts, and another thing that puzzles us terribly is why people
>put up with junk like NFS and RFS.

What's wrong with RFS, other than killing all the processes that were
using it when a link goes down?

Les Mikesell
  les at chinet.chi.il.us