Subject: Tbackup 0.7: backup system for Linux
From: [email-masked] (Koen Holtman)
Date: 9 Jan 1994 15:19:52 +0200
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.announce

I've uploaded version 0.7 of tbackup to our local ftp site:

ftp.win.tue.nl (131.155.70.100) in the directory /pub/linux/tbackup.

 tbackup07.tgz   : tbackup version 0.7 beta

 afio-2.3.6.tgz  : archiver program needed by tbackup07.tgz
                   (New version! tbackup 0.7 won't work with older
                   afio versions)

Apart from several bug fixes, tbackup 0.7 has the following new
features:

 - Support for selective restores
 - Can make backup index files
 - Compression level tuning to get better performance on slow machines
 - Can guess the size of a backup before making it

Part of the README file from tbackup07.tgz follows:
------------------------------------------------------------------------

  tbackup -- general backup system for Linux.
  V0.7 beta
  This is public domain software.  Use it at your own risk.

*** INTRODUCTION

Tbackup (three backup) is a package for making backups of your Linux
filesystem.  It is primarily designed to make multi-megabyte backups
to a set of floppy disks.

*** WHY NOT USE TAR?

Archiver programs such as tar(1), cpio(1) and afio(1) also allow making
backups to a set of floppy disks.   But tar stands for tape archiver,
it was not designed with floppy disks in mind.  You only need one tape
to back up a 100 meg hard disk.  But if you don't have a tape drive,
you need 50 or more floppy disks, and several things can go wrong:

1) disk 45 has a bad sector that can't be written to
2) disk 46 was not formatted 
3) you forgot to insert disk 50 and `pressed enter' with disk 49 in the drive 

Tar was not designed to handle such conditions gracefully.  It will
abort on errors 1) and 2), and will not warn you about 3).  The only
way to correct these errors is to start over again at disk 1, and that
is hardly acceptable.

Tbackup was designed to recover from all the errors above (and a lot more).

For small backups of say less than 5 floppy disks you can just as well
use tar (it is even slightly faster than tbackup), but for big backups
tbackup is better.

When it is used with some auxiliary programs like disksplit(2), tar
can make compressed archives on a set of floppy disks.  However,
compressed tar archives are extremely sensitive to disk errors: if one
sector on disk 5 is damaged, you not only loose a part of disk 5, ALL
information on disks 6-50 will also be lost.

Tbackup makes a fault tolerant kind of compressed archive: it does not
compress the entire archive, it only compresses the files in the
archive, the file headers left intact.  This way, a read error
generally only causes the loss of one or two files.

Trestore can recover all readable information from a damaged disk, and
has no problems processing the next disks if a floppy is damaged or
missing.

*** OTHER ADVANTAGES

Apart from the error recovery mechanisms, tbackup has some other
advantages.

- No command line arguments needed.  I don't make backups all day, so
  I can't remember N options.  Tbackup asks for all relevant
  parameters and gives verbose explanations.  (You can still use
  command line arguments if you want to.)

- Hides details: You don't need to have any deep UNIX knowledge to
  use tbackup and understand it's error messages.  In particular
  tbackup will hide the weirdness of the Linux floppy drivers. 
  (The drivers don't report write errors to the writing program!!)

- Customizability: You can set default values for parameters and
  preset parameters to a fixed value.

- Backup Index: A tbackup index file not only lists the files in an
  archive but also shows the floppy disk numbers the files were
  written to.  This is useful for making quick selective restores.

*** INSTALLATION

1) For running tbackup, you need to have the following software:

     mtools
     fdformat
     gawk
     gzip
     afio (version 2.3.6)
     a Linux kernel version supporting the /proc filesystem

   The afio archiver program can be found at various ftp sites:

     nic.funet.fi    : /pub/OS/Linux/util/backup/afio-2.3.6.tgz
     sunsite.unc.edu : /pub/Linux/system/Backup/afio-2.3.6.tgz
     ftp.win.tue.nl  : /pub/linux/tbackup/afio-2.3.6.tgz

   Note that older versions of afio won't work with this version of
   tbackup.

2) If you have no older tbackup version installed, go to 3).

   If you do have an older tbackup version installed, remove it first
   by typing
 
     rm -r /usr/lib/tbackup

   Existing tbackup directory set configuration and log files in
   /etc/tbackup can still be used with the new tbackup version.

3) cd to the / directory and untar the tbackup archive.
   The files unpack to the directory /usr/lib/tbackup.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

LSM entry:

Begin2
Title        = Tbackup
Version      = 0.7
Desc1        = Tbackup (three backup) is a fault tolerant package for making
Desc2        = backups of a linux filesystem.  It is primarily designed to
Desc3        = make multi-megabyte backups to a set of floppy disks.
Desc4        = Tbackup can make compressed archives, and unlike tar+compress
Desc5        = it can still deal with them if they are partially damaged.
Author       = Koen Holtman
AuthorEmail  = [email-masked]
Site1        = ftp.win.tue.nl
Path1        = /pub/linux/tbackup
File1        = tbackup07.tgz
Required1    = gcc, mtools, fdformat, gawk, gzip, afio version 2.3.6.
CopyPolicy1  = Freely Redistributable
Keywords     = tbackup  backup  floppy disk  fault tolerant  afio
Entered      = 02JAN94
EnteredBy    = Koen Holtman
CheckedEmail = [email-masked]
End

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Koen Holtman                                "Limonade!  Kristallizatie!"
[email-masked]                                         --Multatuli

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