Subject: Re: [netatalk-admins] tape backup to a mac
From: Sak Wathanasin (sw@nan.co.uk)
Date: Mon May 17 1999 - 15:03:47 EDT
In reply to Bob Atkins's message of the 17/05/99 at 00:44 -0700,
> While Retrospect may be a good product it is a proprietary product and
> it is fairly expensive.
It's not cheap, but it's not that expensive either, and costs a lot less than
losing all my data.
> A Mac backup application that uses the Unix rmt service
> would be very simple to do
Oh, I don't know... You can probably do 90% easily, but then come the hard bits
like backing up and restoring all the Finder info and the boot blocks. With
Retrospect if you munge a disk, you can pull it out, put in a new one,
low-level format it, do a volume restore and you have an exact copy of the
pre-munged disk, including the icon and window positions of every file and
folder, the AppleShare priviledges (if any) and the boot blocks*. Pulling off
this trick with rmt would be interesting... I'm not saying it can't be done -
Retrospect clearly can with its "FTP backup" -, only that it's not as easy as
you make it out to be.
[* You are probably thinking that the disk formatter would do this. Some can,
but even so, you run the risk of not getting the same vintage of boot blocks as
the system that was on the munged disk. This matters a lot less these days
(ever since Apple introduced "universal" bootable systems), but it can still
bite you.]
Sak Wathanasin
Network Analysis Limited
178 Wainbody Ave South, Coventry CV3 6BX, UK
Internet: sw@nan.co.uk
Phone: (+44) 1203 419996 Fax: (+44) 1203 690690
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