Re: using FAT floppies- a drawback

[glhenni@cs.sandia.gov (Gary L. Hennigan)]

Pollywog <pollywog@shadypond.com> writes:
| On 09-Apr-99 Gary L. Hennigan wrote:
| > Pollywog <pollywog@shadypond.com> writes:
| >| I was going about reformatting a floppy disk I use to backup my Exim
| >| filters
| >| and configs and I remembered something:  DOS floppies are limited to 8.3
| >| type
| >| names.  I believe there are some ways around this which I cannot
| >| remember, but instead I will keep using ext2 on some floppies like this
| >| one.
| > 
| > Do you need to read these floppies on a DOS system? If not don't even
| > bother formatting them, just use tar on the device itself, e.g.,
| > 
| > tar cvf /dev/fd0 <files>
| 
| I was not certain that I could do that.  Does this mean I can tar a small
| directory tree and copy it to floppy using any filename I like?

I don't think you can rename the files with tar. You may be thinking
of a tar archive, where you do "tar cvf filename /usr/directory". To
copy the files to floppy you use the device is place of "filename".

| For instance, could I tar (recursively) /local/mail and copy all the files to
| a floppy with the directory structure intact?  I know this can be
| done on tape. 

Others have answered this and yes it is quite possible. You can even
span multiple floppies using the "-M" option to tar. Also, someone
else mentioned that a bad sector would disallow you from reading the
floppy. While formatting the floppy can certainly be done I'd
personally just recommend using the "-W" tar option to verify it. This
just causes tar to reread what it just wrote to the floppy and compare
it to the original. It's too time consuming to do this on most tapes,
but on a floppy it doesn't take much time at all, particularly a
single floppy.

Gary