Re: Does anyone use ZIP disks to backup/restore their system? How?

[Wouter Hanegraaff <hanegraa@wins.uva.nl>]

On Tue, Nov 02, 1999 at 02:11:09AM -0800, John Miskinis wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm hoping to find a set of tools that will allow a linux system
> to be backed up, and restored, using ZIP disks.  I would really
> appreciate any advise on this subject, from anyone who has
> successfully restored a system from a multi-volume set.

I've heard taper can work with zipdisks.
However, if you have enough disk space you can just use tar and split to
make a splitted (and gzip'd) tarfile in /tmp, and then just copy the splits
to your zipdisk.
This requires some extra disk space but makes life rather easy

so you could do 
cd /tmp
tar -cvf- /home | split --bytes=90m -  home.tar.

This will tar /home and pipe the result to split which creates files of 
90 MB each.  Now you will have in /tmp/ a set of files named home.tar.aa,
home.tar.ab, etc. and you copy each of these files to a seperate zipdisk

To restore the system you first restore the tarfile by 
cat /zip/home.tar.aX >> /tmp/home.tar for each zipdisk
(be careful to use the right order or you'll be in serious trouble)

Then you can simply do 
cd /
tar xf /tmp/home.tar
to restore your homedir

Have fun,

Wouter