"Backup" program (was: will dump/restore be available on 5.4)

[Chris Robertson]

In article <1990Jun6.214558.29674 at iclswe.uucp> lars at iclswe.uucp (Lars Tunkrans) writes:
>cander at unisoft.UUCP (Charles Anderson) writes:
>
>>From article <30178 at cup.portal.com>, by tms at cup.portal.com:
>>> Will the Unix Dump/Restore utilities be available on Unix 5.4?  Will
>>> there be a new, perhaps better utility for backup.  What about
>>> tar and cpio.  Will both still be supported?
>
>SVR4.0 Does in addition to tar & cpio & dd also include "backup" carried 
>forward from the Xenix Environment.
>
>Extract from the man page:

[deleted man page extract]

That looks extremely like the SysV/386 R3.2 utility "backup" on
my Bell Tech Unix.  If it is, it's just a wrapper for cpio, with
an index file at the first file on the first volume (so that the
cpio archive is actually the second file on the volume).  It's a
bit deceptive about what it does -- it will only give you adequate
backups if you never add any non-standard files or directories to
your / or /usr partitions.

It runs from two files in /etc -- by memory, they are Backup and
Ignore, but I'm posting from work and my machine is at home, so
this may be wrong.  "Backup" contains a list of directories to look
at and files from other directories to add to the backup list;
"Ignore" contains filenames to remove from the list.  The script
does a "find" on the directory list (with a -newer flag for a partial)
to a file in /tmp, twiddles this list a bit to remove the "Ignore" files,
does a "du -a" on the list, adds it up, works out the volumes,
and fires up cpio.  It is absolutely intolerant of media faults
(bad 14th floppy of 15?  you lose).

I had put a local bin and a few other things in / (doing a bit
of creative disk space management), and had to do a lot of mods
to the Backup and Ignore list to get reasonable coverage of /
and /usr.  Their Ignore handling is pretty simplistic, too.
I'd caution anyone who plans using it to have a good look at the
script and the Backup and Ignore files to make sure they really
are covered if they use it.

If anyone is interested, I will post the scripts I am doing for
backups and checksumming files, designed to ensure any non-installation-
floppy stuff you put on your system, and any of the standard files you
have changed, are backed up, and any changed checksums reported (not
the same script, BTW), once I finish and have tested them.

-- 
"Down in the dumps?  I TOLD you you'd     |    Chris Robertson
 need two sets..."                        |  chris at mcc.pyrsyd.oz