On Wed, 27 Jun 2001, Russel Ingram wrote:
> On Tue, 26 Jun 2001, Gonyou, Austin wrote:
> > Will those actions yield a tape which only has the last dump on it, or will
> > it seek to the end of the last dump, and then start writing? If it does do
> > that, then I'm set. As I'm led to believe that it does from Steve Lord's
> > previous post. I just didn't see that behaviour with dump I don't think, so
> > I'm just skeptical without getting it substantiated first. Thanks for the
> > feedback.
>
> Doing it with that particular device will result in several dumps that
> overwrite each other (I'm pretty sure). To be sure to avoid overwriting
> individual dumps use the non-rewinding device:
xfsdump will actually skip over dumps that may already exist on the tape.
The way it works is that it will read the tape and if it finds a dump, it
will skip past it and then do another read. It will fail if it finds
something that is not a dump otherwise it will write after all the other
dumps.
Specifying '-o' (overwrite) disables this behaviour, causing xfsdump to
just write wherever the tape is positioned.
(If you find that xfsdump doesn't behave as advertised, please let us
know.)
> Now, since I just finally got a tape drive working on my Linux system with
> XFS, I have a quick question for the xfsdump folks. xfsdump on Irix gives
> sort of a progress report with percent of job done. Is there a reason
> this is no in the Linux version?
xfsdump on linux does not include threading, ie. it runs in a single
thread. Progress reporting is a feature of xfsdump's multi-threaded mode.
The reason the Linux version is single threaded is simply that I was moved
onto other things before I finished the port. The only real functionality
lost is the ability to write several tapes at once and it was felt that
this probably wouldn't be a big issue for the Linux folk at the moment.
Ivan
--
Ivan Rayner
ivanr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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