Dumping to an Exabyte (Was: cart tapes)

[morley@aaii.oz.au (David Morley)]

Speaking of cart tapes.  I also have a question.

We have an Exabyte (8mm video cassette based thingy) on one of our
Suns.  We use it as a backup device for our Symbolics as follows: Each
night, the Sun sends requests to each of the Symbolics asking it to
dump its files, which it dutifully does.  All the dumps for a week go
on one tape.  One of the guys here modified the RTAPE server on the
Sun so that all the individual files written by one of the Symbolics
ended up in the same (big) file on the Exabyte (apparently inter-file
separators on the Exabyte take up a meg or two of space, also it make
finding a particular machine's dump on a tape a lot easier).

All was well under 7.2, but when we converted to 8.0 it no longer
worked.  After a bit of ferretting around, I found that I could get it
to work by adding :TRY-APPEND NIL to the call to LMFS:BACKUP-DUMPER
and by binding LMFS:*CURRENT-BACKUP-TAPE-VERSION* to 3 (presumably an
old 7.2 format rather than the new 8.0 format?).  However, I am not
too keen on locking us into an apparently old format.

QUESTION:

Has anyone else tried using an Exabyte for dumps and is there a better
way of doing things? 

(By the way, if anyone is interested in using our code, I can mail it out)

	David Morley (morley@aaii.oz.au)