My most important real need here is for tar backup to a medium without a
file-system applied. That does seem to work fine. My Linux installation
has grown to the point where it no longer fits on a single 230 MB disk,
and while GNUtar can do multi-disk backups, it cannot do so with
compression. So I would wind up using 5 disks, and that is a bit much.
I was able to backup to a single 640 MB disk. The only checking that I
really could easily do to be sure that it all got to the disk, was to read
the file list back with tvfz and compare that with the original drive. It
all seems to be there.
And putting an ext2 file system on the media with the -b 2048 switch seems
to work fine also. It is nice to know that I can do that, but for most of
my uses the 230 MB media are more than sufficient for random access
storage.
Where I apparently ran into problems was trying to read a disk with a
partitioned NTFS file system made under NT with Linux. It apparently
cannot do that. And then I compounded the problem by looking at the disk
with Linux fdisk, which showed me the apparent size of about 150 MB. At
which point I panicked. ;-) I am not really sure if the problem that I
ran into is in the NTFS drivers or the code that deals with partitioning.
>From one of the replies that I got, I suspect that the problem is the
latter. But NT will not deal with the 640 MB media in SuperFloppy format
though it has no problems using that with the 230 MB media. I found THAT
out when I first got this package of media, and could not format it. A
call to Fujitsu (that company gives EXCELLENT support!!!) told me that I
HAD to partition the disk to use it under NT. So I did, and now I find
that it is not portable to Linux that way. But I guess that that is only
a minor problem, at least for me.
Once again, a big THANKS to all who responded and got me to get off my
duff and actually TRY things.
Harvey
-- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Harvey Fishman | fishman@panix.com | A little heresy is good for the soul. 718-258-7276 |
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