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Date:      Tue, 15 Jan 2002 21:22:51 -0500
From:      Brian T.Schellenberger <bts@babbleon.org>
To:        "Mike Meyer" <mwm-dated-1011576378.402618@mired.org>
Cc:        questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: HOWTO -- backup onto CDRs?
Message-ID:  <0a2d11623021012FE4@mail4.nc.rr.com>
In-Reply-To: <15428.54969.119254.138926@guru.mired.org>
References:  <15426.33499.296182.78699@guru.mired.org> <200201152209.g0FM9eI00811@i8k.babbleon.org> <15428.54969.119254.138926@guru.mired.org>

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On Tuesday 15 January 2002 08:26 pm, Mike Meyer wrote:
> Brian T. Schellenberger <bts@babbleon.org> types:
> > > > I did this all the time under Linux; even with a P-450 it worked just
> > > > fine as long as the system wasn't overtaxed (as in, load < 2), using
> > > > the stdin feature of cdrecord.  I tried with burncd under FreeBSD and
> > > > had no success, though.  Of course, cdrecord doesn't support stdin
> > > > input so I
> >
> > Drat.  I meant  "Of course, burncd doesn't support stdin . . . ."
>
> Use /dev/stdin as the file to burn. That works with burncd for me.
>
> Brian T. Schellenberger <bts@babbleon.org> types:
> > On Tuesday 15 January 2002 02:48 pm, Gary W. Swearingen wrote:
> > > Anybody know what FS-specific (dump/restore) and non-FS-specific (tar,
> > > cpio, pax, afio) archivers SHOULD do with sockets and named pipes? (Are
> > > there any other kind of weird "files" besides those and block- &
> > > character-special files and symbolic links?)
> >
> > Anyway, these are the only types of files that perl knows aobut; looks
> > pretty complete to me:
>
> There's one other type of screwy file: sparse files. These have
> "holes" where there are no blocks on disk. You can create one
> trivially:
>
> bash-2.05$ dd if=/dev/zero of=y oseek=1000 count=2
> 2+0 records in
> 2+0 records out
> 1024 bytes transferred in 0.000059 secs (17353403 bytes/sec)
> bash-2.05$ ls -l y
> -rw-r--r--  1 mwm  wheel  513024 Jan 15 19:19 y
> bash-2.05$ df .
> Filesystem  1K-blocks     Used    Avail Capacity  Mounted on
> mfs:28         127023      111   116751     0%    /tmp
> bash-2.05$ rm y
>
> So I now have a file 513K long that occupies 1K of disk space. In
> fact, the file is on a file system that's only 127K in size.
>
> The nasty part about sparse files is that there is no way to recognize
> them as such without examining the file systems internal
> structures. For instance:
>
> bash-2.05$ wc y
>        0       1  513024 y
>
> The system provides a block full of zeros for the blocks that are
> missing. Tar tries to recognize them as such. Cpio only does that if
> you use the --sparse option.

Are these at all common?  For the matter, are they preserved by cp?  They 
seem like a hyphothetical concern more than a practical one and a nuisance 
more than a benefit.  But maybe that's just me.

Regardless, if you do a compressed backup they should compress real nicely 
(though not as efficiently as the sparse files), though they will spring to 
full space on a restore if the backup/restore program isn't clueful about 
them.

>
> 	<mike

-- 
Brian T. Schellenberger . . . . . . .   bts@wnt.sas.com (work)
Brian, the man from Babble-On . . . .   bts@babbleon.org (personal)
                                        http://www.babbleon.org

-------> Free Dmitry Sklyarov!  (let him go home)  <-----------

http://www.eff.org                 http://www.programming-freedom.org 

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