Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (2702 mails)

[Ted.Harding@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ((Ted Harding))]

Hi Folks,

A practical question, and a philosophical question ...

1. Anyone out there using "taper" for backing up? I have just started
experimenting with it. It has useful features, but the version I am using
(taper-6.9a) behaves differently from the description in the
documentation (but does seem to conform to the "help screens"), so I'm
floundering a bit.

In particular, I would like to be able to set it so that sym-links are
followed, i.e. when backing up it copies the file and not just the link.
However, setting this option causes a "get_info" error followed by a
segfault. Leaving it at the default (just back up the link) and doing
everything else identically works fine.

Can anyone comment on this?

2. Discussion point (I'm constantly wondering about this dilemma):
Using fancy backup software (e.g. taper/BRU/...) is nice and handy, and
leads to speed, convenience and space-saving.

However, if you backup as I tend to ("cp -a" to a different disk,
preferably on a different machine), then you know that the backed-up
files are present in raw form and need no special software for
recovery so long as you have a working basic Linux system (which, in
the event of disaster, you may have had to re-create).

On the other hand, if you backup using, say, "taper", then you may face
problems due to the fact that you need "taper" to recover the files from
the archive. This may be version-dependent, etc.

So if you use fancy backup software, you could find yourself (to some
extent at least, for a while) screwed.

Maybe this is a question of your paranoia threshold, etc. I'd be
interested to see other people's views.

Cheers,
Ted.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: 06-Jun-99                                       Time: 12:08:21
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