On 2022-10-08 19:05, Per Jessen wrote:
Lew Wolfgang wrote:
Agree. I think a script being smart with rsync is the way to go. I didn't find anything on-the-shelf that would make sense here.
In my experience - but I only work with tape - anything that involves human intervention is rarely found off-the-shelf.
Ages ago, when I used MsDOS, I had a wonderful backup program. I used it with floppies, but it would work with tapes too, although I never tried. With backups, it would write alternately to disk A or B. When disk A was full, it switched automatically to B and told you to change disk A. And the reverse. You never had to press any key to continue, it would find out without wasting a second. If the machine was single floppy drive, at the end of each floppy it simply asked to replace the disk, which you did, not pressing any key, and the motor not stopping. It was amazing how fast it would go: faster that than I could label the disks. On restore, it read floppies faster than the hard disk could write the files, specially if small (involved more head movements to data, FAT and directory tables). AND, it would both compress the data and and add forward error recovery data, so that the operation could survive bad sectors without losing a file. PCtools backup. Later Microsoft bought a license to include it with MSdos 6 (not the fully featured program, though). It kept a catalogue of what was backed up and where on the hard disk. This catalogue could be retrieved as well from the last floppy (or more). I wish I could get a similar thing on Linux. Not for floppies, of course. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 15.3 x86_64 at Telcontar)