On Tue, Sep 05, 2006 at 10:36:56AM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:

| Not workable at all IMO.  You cannot just willy-nilly rewrite the partition 
| table if you don't want to lose ALL the data in the next higher partition 
| and all those above it.  If that was the only partition, and you were 

Have you written to tape file 1, especially when there is more data this
time than previously, and then later recovered from tape file 2?

The semantics of overwriting partitions on disk, vis-a-vis the issue of
an earlier partition growing over a later partition, are just the same
as tape files on a tape.  Emulating a tape on a raw disk would not be
hard at all with respect to handling this.


| using the disks as tapes, meaning that for 20 'tapes' you'd have to have 
| 20 disks in carriers, then I assume it could be made to work.  The only 
| place I might be able to see a speed advantage is where the individual 
| dle's were less than 1k in total size as you would be skipping the file 
| opening and closing housekeeping along with the allocation searches.  But 
| as I point out in another post, disk speed, at least for me, is not a 
| factor to consider as its many times faster than some of the other 
| operations, like compression.  And my storage disk is slow, only a 7200 
| rpm'er.

Granted, disks do not come in "media changers".  My needs only need one
disk per backup cycle (400 GB each).  I'd use an external disk and plug
a new one in before the backup time, and unplug it when done.  Next time
a different disk is used.

I do need the speed.  And compression won't be a bottleneck for me because
I won't be using it (most of the data, MPEG/DV A/V files) are already about
as compressed as they ever will be (short of re-compressing to the latest
greatest MPEG4).

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Phil Howard KA9WGN       | http://linuxhomepage.com/      http://ham.org/ |
| (first name) at ipal.net | http://phil.ipal.org/   http://ka9wgn.ham.org/ |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------