Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ncar!ames!ucsd!sdcsvax!celece!markley
From: markley@celece.ucsd.edu (Mike Markley)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: more SR10 questions
Message-ID: <5627@sdcsvax.UCSD.EDU>
Date: 5 Dec 88 19:11:58 GMT
References: <8812051455.AA06261@richter.mit.edu>
Sender: nobody@sdcsvax.UCSD.EDU
Reply-To: markley@celece.UUCP (Mike Markley)
Organization: UCSD Office of Academic Computing
Lines: 31

In article <8812051455.AA06261@richter.mit.edu> krowitz@RICHTER.MIT.EDU (David Krowitz) writes:
>One way in which backups can be speed up is the method used by Workstations
>Solutions' backup product. They start clients on several nodes which all
>feed data back to a server which writes the tape. Since the clients run
>independently of each other they can process several disks simultaneously
>and send the server buffers of data which have already been formatted for
>the backup tape. The only drawback to this approach is that you wind up 
>with files from multiple disks all interleaved in a single backup file on
>the tape rather than in seperate backups. It is easier to retrieve files
>from a backup when you know for certain which tape it is on. Incremental
>backups, however, are frequently done which several disks all on a single
>tape, in which case the method used by Workstation Solutions gives the
>same results a whole lot faster.
>
>
> -- David Krowitz
>

I have read in the SR10 documentation that rbak/wbak will
write to a file so it would be possible to create a backup
directory on every node and then run wbak as a server that
writes to the backup directory.  You could set it up so
that wbak ran at some odd hour and then every morning it would
only be necessary to copy the backup directories to tape.
This would be faster since you could always do a full backup
and then wbak would not have to check the dates on the files.
This is the strategy that I plan to impliment when I upgrade
to SR10 some time in the future.

Mike Markley
markley@celece.ucsd.edu