Tape backups and Disk management

[Roger Jagoda]

Folks,
 
I know this can't be too hard, but NO ONE in Unix-land seems to
know what I'm talking about. I'm a converted (truly!) PC guru
used to working with Novell Lans and 386s. Now I work on Unix
workstations. Under trusty old DOS, I sometimes had problems
with disk fragmentations. In other words, files became scattered
all over the disk and head performance suffered on seeks of the
random data. Now, the same problem exists under UNIX, but with
DOS systems I have my choice of 6 or 7 GOOD disk managers/defragmentors.
Under UNIX, there doesn't seem to be ANYTHING (or if there is could
someone point me towards it). Performance still sufferes but you'd
think the UNIX world would have access to the same tools as the
DOS (Dumb OS?) world...wouldn't you?
 
Another somewhat silly question. We're using dump for our backups.
I ahve heard of BRU and CTAR. Has anyone used these and found them
satisfactory? Their priced within our range, I just wanted to get
some feedback before buying. BTW, what does "dd" do so well that people
tell me I should use that for tape backup instead? The man page clearly
shows it for a file conversion utility, such as EBSIDIC to ASCII. Why
would I want to use this in tape backups? Just asking...tar seems good
enough, although, again, under the DOS world, I have my choice of several
GOOD programs for disk management/compression-backup. I just can't under-
stand why the UNIX world has such a dearth of similar software..I guess
everyone just likes to write their own! Seems fun enough!
 
Thanks in advance!
 
--Roger Jagoda
--Cornell University
--FQOJ at CORNELLA.CIT.CORNELL.EDU