On Sun, 24 Jan 1999, Nathan Raymond wrote:

> For a Quadra 610, I'm intested in a realtively inexpensive backup device
> medium (tape, probably) to back up a 3.5 GB drive using incremental backups
> (non-rewinding, so we can do incrementals on one tape) with dump (or a
> better program, if anyone knows of one).  Does anyone have any
> suggestions/experiences?  Thanks in advance!

I'm using an HP SureStore Tape 5000 to dump all my partitions (root,
sometimes /var, /usr) to one 2-4G DDS-1 tape. I test them afterwards
by restoring one or two files from each "file." Since the no-rewind
tape device, /dev/nrst0, is the default, it's pretty easy to do. I've
never actually had to restore an entire system with it. These are the
commands I use

	dump -OuB 4096000 -b16 /
	dump -OuB 4096000 -b16 /usr # it'll stop if the tape fills up!
	eject tape                  # automatically rewinds
	cd /var                     # now reinsert tape	
	restore -is 2               # for /usr

etc. The throughput on the large file systems is always >15mb/min on
my Quadra 630, the small ones go too fast to matter.

These drives are still fairly expensive, but since the DDS-3 drives
are coming out, the DDS-1&2 drives are starting to come down in price.