From owner-freebsd-questions Sun Nov 14 6:31: 5 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from news-ma.rhein-neckar.de (news-ma.rhein-neckar.de [193.197.90.3]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 362A014CFB for ; Sun, 14 Nov 1999 06:31:01 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from daemon@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de) Received: from bigeye.rhein-neckar.de (uucp@localhost) by news-ma.rhein-neckar.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with bsmtp id PAA20677 for freebsd-questions@freebsd.org; Sun, 14 Nov 1999 15:30:56 +0100 (CET) (envelope-from daemon@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de) Received: (from daemon@localhost) by bigeye.rhein-neckar.de (8.9.3/8.9.3) id OAA28959 for freebsd-questions@freebsd.org; Sun, 14 Nov 1999 14:45:53 +0100 (CET) (envelope-from daemon) From: naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de (Christian Weisgerber) Subject: Re: dump -a Date: 14 Nov 1999 14:45:52 +0100 Message-ID: <80meeg$s8k$1@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de> References: <13D5F9EDFD72D211BC3100105A1C22330549E5@akira.lanfear.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Marc Wandschneider wrote: > how good is the -a switch on the dump command? Very good. It's pretty much required for painless backups if you want to put several archives on a single tape or have a drive with compression. > I've got a 12/24GB Sony 4mm SCSI DAT drive, and was wondering if > I had to enter all the density/length commands, That's pretty futile. If you end up having to specify the capacity of the tape, do yourself a favor and use blocks ("-B") rather than the arcane density/length options. > or if the dump command would figure it out on it's own. That's actually not a question of dump figuring it out but rather of the tape driver properly returning a short write. sa(4) apparently does for my Wangtek 51000HT (QIC-1000). > Under Linux, we had no such luck, Until rather recently, the Linux port of dump didn't support "-a" at all. Version 0.4b9 certainly does. I don't know whether the Linux tape driver is up to it, but using rmt on a remote host, "-a" works. -- Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message