[Re: backing up large filesystems]

["Richard P. Welty" <welty%lewis.crd.ge.com@RELAY.CS.NET>]

From: miller@cs.rochester.edu (Brad Miller)

    From: shirley.pa@Xerox.COM

    Are there better solutions to backing up a large filesystem than 40 megabyte
    cart tapes?  We now have ~20 tape full dumps and expect to double that soon.

  RTAPE even between two lispms is usually flakey-flakey. Our CE doesn't
  recommend using the tape except locally as a result of our and other site's
  experiences he's run into....

  You can also get a Cypher drive for your lispm... I'd recommend that over
  RTAPE.

our backups started getting huge, so we broke down and bought
the 6250 9-track tape drive for one of our file servers, and
it reduced 10 or 15 cart tape backups down to two or three reels,
which is a real improvement (we are actually backing up regularly
now.)

we have had some trouble with RTAPE between two 3600s, but recently
our Field Engineer put a 3670 i/o board into the machine with the
tape drive, and the problem appears to have cleared up (Hopefully
this will also fix the problem with irreproduceable Disk Search
Errors during gc-immediately that we were plagued with.)

richard
-- 
richard welty               welty@lewis.crd.ge.com
518-387-6346, GE R&D, K1-5C39, Niskayuna, New York
 Officer:  Do you know how fast you were going?
 Driver:   No.  The speedometer only goes up to 85