Xenix filesystem fragmentation

[Bruce A. McIntyre]

In article <1989Oct20.205754.18669 at i88.isc.com>, daveb at elaited.i88.isc.com (Dave Burton) writes:
> In article <160 at mdi386.UUCP> bruce at mdi386.UUCP (Bruce A. McIntyre) writes:
> |While it is true that rm and restore from tape will unfrag a disk to a
> |large extent, the only way to do it correctly that I know of is with a
> |utility from the people that sell CTAR. (compressed tar)
> So will tar/mkfs/tar, and they're *included* with Xenix.
> Dave Burton
> uunet!ism780c!laidbak!daveb

Regular "tar" will not quite do what you want if you do a new mkfs, because
of the way that tar handles special files and directory permissions.  While
cpio does a little better, there are still some gotchas..  A dump will giv
back all of the info, but somehow I don't always trust dump..

On our bigger systems, we use the PCS Flashback (8mm) mirror image device,
and that is both correct and fast.  To do the clean up, we don't use the
mirror image routine of course, because it wouldn't fix the frag problem,
but the regular fpio routine is almost as fast, and does handle everything
correctly.  I have backed up, mkfs'd and restored a 300mb drive in less
than an hour this way.

bruce
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