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- Newsgroups: comp.os.coherent
- Path: sparky!uunet!news.uiowa.edu!news.weeg.uiowa.edu!schwaigr
- From: schwaigr@news.weeg.uiowa.edu (Jim Schwaiger)
- Subject: Bad Surprise
- Message-ID: <1993Jan21.163003.22545@news.weeg.uiowa.edu>
- Organization: University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA
- Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1993 16:30:03 GMT
- Lines: 29
-
- I recently decided to reinstall my system, and before doing so I
- responsibly backed up my working directory with the command:
-
- tar cvbf 20 /usr/jims
-
- This worked fine, as it had multiple times in the past, so I decided
- to go ahead and reformat my Coherent partition during the reinstall.
-
- After the reinstall, I decided to retrieve my work by executing:
-
- tar xvf /dev/fha0
-
- Which worked fine at loading my saved files until it read:
-
- {Insert next disk or press quit to abort}
-
- Imagine my surprise when all of my backups over the past 4 months
- have required only 1 disk! Apparently tar simply quits when it
- reaches the end of the first disk (while writing) without giving
- any opportunity to load a second disk.
-
- For me, this represents about 3-400 man hours of effort lost.
- Don't let this happen to you!
-
- Jim
-
- P.S. I have a QIC tape on my system. If I knew of this problem, I
- could have easily backed up my work by copying to a DOS partition and
- backing that to tape.
-