Date: Tue, 19 Jan 1999 14:16:29 -0500 (EST) From: "Crist J. Clark" <cjc@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com> To: billh@finsco.com (Bill Hamilton) Cc: csubl@csv.warwick.ac.uk, clash@tasam.com, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Large block size for very large files Message-ID: <199901191916.OAA25001@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com> In-Reply-To: <36A4D38F.B1043BE1@finsco.com> from Bill Hamilton at "Jan 19, 99 12:48:47 pm"
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Bill Hamilton wrote, > Mr M P Searle wrote: > > > > > I have a backup drive (8gb) and I tar the rest of my system onto that > > > drive, so the only thing sitting on the backup drive is my 3-4gb tar file. > > > > > > Would it be wise for me to increse my block size so that this filesystem > > > would have less overhead that I don't need? > > > > > > > If you're not putting anything else on that partition, you could tar > > directly to the device without having any overhead from a filesystem. > > > I was thinking of doing what he is doing with a partition on a new 9G > scsi. > Does your answer mean to treat the device as "raw"? I've never tried > this, > so bear with me, but do you need to modify fstab for this purpose, or > does every > slice just always have an r* equivalent? Since it will not be mounted, there is no real need to include it in /etc/fstab. But you could if you'd like. > Are there any gottchas if you need to restore all/partial from it? If the cause of the restore is physical failure of the disk and/or drive, keeping your backups on that same disk is not particularly useful. tar will not likely be able to put multiple archives on the device or be able to append to an existing one. I had similar issues with dump finding the end of the previous dump to append to. I was trying to use a Jaz disk as a raw device for backup purposes. In the end, I found it more convenient to put a filesystem on it and pay the overhead cost in return for putting multiple dumps in multiple files (and then being able to gzip old dumps too! ;). -- Crist J. Clark cjclark@home.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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