How do I restor a set of incremental dumps?

[Henry Spencer]

Sounds like what used to happen to us, back when we did our dumps
while running multi-user, when we foolishly tried to restor an
incremental in on top of a full.  The contents of a dump tape made
on a non-quiescent file system are unreliable, period.  It usually
turned out that one could restor a full backup without *too* much
trouble, but chaos and madness were guaranteed if one tried to bring
in an incremental on top of it.

The problem went away, completely, when we started insisting that our
dumps be done single-user.  We had to put up with screams of outrage
for a little while until people got used to the downtime, but we've
done multi-level restors several times since and they work perfectly.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry