Date: Tue, 11 Mar 1997 17:22:00 -0600 From: tom@peeper.jackson.org (Tom Jackson) To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Cc: softweyr@xmission.com (Wes Peters), joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) Subject: Re: Floppy drive Message-ID: <199703112322.RAA03095@peeper.jackson.org> In-Reply-To: <199703080537.WAA09723@obie.softweyr.ml.org>; from Wes Peters on Mar 7, 1997 22:37:19 -0700 References: <331B6598.39B8@primenet.com> <199703080537.WAA09723@obie.softweyr.ml.org>
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Wes Peters writes: > Since all the other answers I saw only addressed using floppies with a > filesystem on them, I'll chime in with the alternative. You can treat > the 'raw' floppy device as if it is a tape drive, and use typically UNIX > tape tools to read/write, such as tar, cpio, and pax. For instance, to > copy the current directory onto a floppy to take home at night: > > [snip] > > You don't have to mount or unmount it. This should work particularly > well with Zip drives. ;^) > Well, my friend Wes mentioned floppy and Zip drive in the same message, so this me a `foot in door' excuse to ask this question. Concerns backups. I had been using *floppy* tape drive (colorado 250) and `ft' for doing backups. To me this had several disadvantages. Mainly, you could not do multiple-volume compressed backups to tape. Some time ago J"org mentioned a nifty pipe command: dump 0uBf 150000 - / | gzip | dd conv=osync | ft 'my compressed root';. This works great except you only do one dump per tape. I looked into `lft' and yikes, you can do multiple compressed dumps on a series of qic80 tapes. That's a fyi for those using floppy tapes. In the process of moving from ide to scsi I wanted to eliminate the floppy tape drive and use my new ezflyer scsi disk drive (like a scsi *Zip*) to do dumps. Tried `dump 0uaf - (fs) | gzip | dd conv=osync >(or >>) /dev/[r]sd3. This works for one dump within the one disk cartridge but not for multiple dumps to one cartridge (disk) and the sense for end-of-media to tell you to change tape (disk). Multiple dumps overwrite each other and going to the end of the disk aborts the dump. Any comments, suggestions, I hope, Tom ps: the `a' option is the autosense for end of tape; new feature. Tried the `B' option also, still didn't work. -- Tom Jackson Powered by FreeBSD toj@gorilla.net http://www.freebsd.org tjackson@tulsix.utulsa.edu "Out in the Ozone Again"
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