Wasn't compressing info files
Release Date: 20-April-97
- Support for networked drives - ie. can use the filename "remotemachine:/dev/tape", like tar.
Changes
- Optimize level at 6 instead of 2
- Less flickering in restore box
- Uses asm string routines if defined
- Change to make directory routines - slightly more efficient
- Added -I/usr/include/ncurses in the Makefile.common since that's where
the default ncurses header files are now going
- Removed second index file (.2) - to save space - this means that
info files need to be recreated for 6.8.0a4
- When processing info for restore, only loops through archive once,
hence saving time
- When processing info for restore, also looks for most recent entries
then and stores, which means that selecting in restore is a lot faster
- Added some more logging to try and find out why some drives
seek in a manner taper doesn't understand
- Reversed change made a few versions ago - can't ESC back a menu.
Trouble was some xterms send two ESCs when you press ESC, so
was exiting.
Bug Fixes
- Bug with environment variables NTAPE and TAPE - was ignoring one
- Couldn't reindex files if one or both index files were missing
- Not processing --tape-name preference before -tape-name preference
- Problem toggling between most recent restore and absolute restore if
you had selected the file from a prior volume
- Problem restoring files from multiple volumes in one restore session
Release Date: 11-April-97
New
- Added some more logging to can seek utility to try and fix
the wangdet problem
Changes
- Removed support for eom command introduced into 6.7.4. Too many tape
drives don't like it.
- In erase vols, changed user interface for entering # volumes to delete
Bug Fixes
- Fixed problem with toggling between incremental and full
backup
- Occassionally, not all filles written out in backup
- Sometimes, wrong volume was written to backup - fixed bug and
auto work around for those backups affected
- Doesn't backup up info files associated with backup being made
- Fixed problem in Makefile - -l$(FORM) -l$(CURSES) rather than the
other way around
- Seg faulting if tried to select a file from the 'on archive' window
- Allowed you to select the same directory multiple times in restore
- In backup, not saving pos_in_archive in index files
- Problem with incremental backups
- Fixed problem with erasing volumes
Release Date: 30-mar-97
New
Changes
- Updated FAQ to reflect new version of ftape
- In selecting files to restore, can't go up beyond the common
directory.
Bug Fixes
- Problem if restore or verify ran out of temporary disk space
- In verify, if the file had gone from disk, it was not deleting the
associated temporary file.
- Not printing time archive backed up in right window properly.
Release Date: 29-mar-97
NOTE NEW E-MAIL ADDRESS: yusuf@multiline.com.au
New
- New option for sizing directories during backup file selection
(-M or --size-dirs). If TRUE (default), then directories are sized
when selecting them in backup module. If FALSE, the nthe directories
are not sized hence no size of backup is displayed.
- New option for unattended backups (-V or --unattended-id). If
an archive ID is specified, then taper will only append unattended
backups to the archive 'ID'. If another archive tape is in the
drive, the backup won't be made and the user mailed
- Major change in info file handling. The info file is now a set
of info files which is in the form of an mtree. This means
that file details are not kept in memory and hence, the system load
is dramatically reduced as is memory usage.
This means that the option --memory-tight has gone. Also, the file
is kept in alphabetical order so the option --sort-dir has gone.
Info files have to be recreated to be used with this version. You
do not have to recreate your backups, just the info files.
- New utility for the new info files. Reindex info file reindexes
the info file in case of corruption. Also, it means that each
index doesn't have to be archived if you want to save the info
files.
- If filenames and paths are longer than fits on the screen, does
what midnight commander does and prints beginning & end of filename
with a '~' in the middle.
- New option in restore and backup windows. Pressing 'D' will
give details about a file/directory.
- New option in restore and backup windows. Pressing 'L' will
enable you to search through the archive or directory for a particular
file
- New option in restore and backup windows. Pressing 'J' will
allow you to jump to a particular directory.
- Taper has a web page at www.multiline.com.au/~yusuf/
Changes
- Changes in the command set in backing and restoring
- Selecting a file for backing up or restoring changed from 's' to 'i' (include)
- Saving a backup set changed from 'b' to 's' (save)
- Restoring a backup set changed from 'l' to 'r' (restore)
- When saving preferences file names
- ESC now aborts the process and ENTER accepts
- Asks for confirmation before saving
- Changed handling for block sizes for zftape. Means that you
can't have a block size < 2K.
- Changed the name of the option "hard-link" to "soft-links". This
is in preparation for handling soft and hard links separately.
- Changes to the documentation. The changes file
is in html form. The rest are unchanged.
- ESC goes up a menu
- documentation files are now in the docs directory
- if can't open the backup device at beginning of backup,
tells user about error and gives opportunity to fix it
- aout support in the Makefile is gone
- When tape sizes are given in MB, assumes 1MB = 1,000,000 bytes
because that is what some tape drive manufacturers state
(this way, they can advertise their tape drive as 125MB,
instead of 119MB like it should be)
- Changed size_t to ssize_t as per change in libraries
- When printing an archive directory, prints in archive order and
then alphabetical order
- More logging in backup child
Bug Fixes
- Error in handling of end of tape: seg faulting if could write
a partial block at end of tape
- If got an I/O error doing unattended backup, segmentation
faulted out - now cleanly exits
- Seg fault if encountered an I/O error while reading and
user tried to RETRY
- Overwrote device file entries sometimes
- If error in mkinfo, was hanging before return to main menu
- Hung if couldn't create write a backup/restore set
Release Date: 5-aug-96
New
- Information in the FAQ about parallel port tape drives.
- Can select the root directory in backup
- New preference : min-before-seek : allows user to specify
how many blocks the tape needs to be advanced before doing
a seek, rather than just streaming
Changes
- Removed allocation of zero bytes - wasn't a bug but some compilers
barfed at allocating 0 bytes
- write_null_header returns error if error encountered
- prints version in log file
- since ncurses 1.9.9e, the curses.h file is placed in /usr/include so
the Makefile has been changed to reflect that
- uses eom instead of fsf for appending to tapes - for the few tape
drives that were slightly non-standard
- put a `signed' in front of definition of some variables for
people who were using compilers that didn't default to signed
variables if unspecified
- support for tape drives that commence block numbers that commence
at 1 instead of 0
- if invalid tape in drive when restore selected, still allows you
to browse archives that the system knows about
Bug Fixes
- ratios being printed with signs, rather than unsigned
- not correctly resetting sid/gid on restore
- seg faulting on backup abort
- not correctly removing old info file when overwriting archive
- bug in end of tape handling and I/O error handling for backup
- reworked reading/writing errors so they only read/write in
block_sizes even in error conditions
- prints an error message if cannot position on a block
Release Date: 17-jun-96
New
Changes
- Removed -fno-common from CFLAGS in Makefile for production
version
Bug Fixes
- If get an error while backing up, was not closing backup device
- Problem backing up files after excluded directory
- Bug fix in the file count for verify & restore
- Log file message problem in verifying
- In triple buffering, if child encountered an error, then the
error recovery procedures sometimes got it wrong
Release Date: 17-jun-96
New
Changes
- In the selected window, prints the byte count if less than 1K
Bug Fixes
- Not removing co-ordinating pipes between write child & taper
- Memory overrun in add_missing_dirs fixed
- Error in restore if backed up one file only
- If had selected a file, backup marked all files with that filename
as prefix as for backup. Didn't backup them up though (ie.cosmetic bug)
- Sometimes, file sizes in backup were not correct
- Bug in not auto-descending of directories
- If selected one file for full backup, was not printing size
correctly - didn't affect backup which was done correctly
(ie.cosmetic bug)
- Screen update in reading volume directory
- Few bugs in the co-ordinating of child writing & main process
- Bug causing errors while creating multiple directories
- In restore, allowed you to put wrong tape in drive
Release Date: 15-jun-96
New
Changes
- Use of pipes if using triple buffering to co-ordinate
between parent & child writing process - should help
system load immensely
- Use of IPC_PRIVATE for getting unique shared memory keyss
rather than randomly trying keys
Bug Fixes
- Problem in identifying most recent file in multi-volume backup
- Problem with specific tape types handling in preference file
- Problem with re-allocating buffer errors on end of tape
- Memory being free'd twice --> segmentation fault at end of backup
Release Date: 6-jun-96
New
- If seg faults, tries to write the fact to log file
- Problem using libc 5.3.12 and binutils 2.6.0.12 - make
sure you upgrade to binutils 2.6.0.14 if using libc
5.3.12 if taper doesn't work for you.
No problems if using stable 5.2.x release
- Backup child checks for available disk space - if not enough
waits until there is before compressing
- Error messages printed if restore or backup children cannot
be started
- New option (+/-W) for reconstructing info files on archives
created by taper version < 5.6
- New option (-Y) which specifies the minimum amount of disk
space that must be free before a file is compressed
- Couple improvements to Makefile
Changes
- Added a suggestion in the docs about excluding netscape's
cache directories
- When doing a mkinfo/verify/full restore, does not print an
I/O error when advancing to non-existent volume
- Changed default mailing program from deliver to mail
Bug Fixes
- Problem with bg_backup & backup getting out of sync if you
changed the exclude compress options
- bg_backup/restore weren't using the temp_dir option if you changed it
via a preference file or via change preferences menu
- Doing a free on a block twice which results in a seg fault
on some machines so all such references removed
- One more instance where a zombie process could end up plugged
- Problem with unattended backup crashing if tape needed overwriting
- Problem if restore had to get some files from one volume and
some from another as part of the same directory to restore
- A few more 1024 filename lengths found and fixed
Release Date: 19-may-96
New
- New option (--tmp-dir or -P) which allows user to specify where
temporary files should be stored - default is /usr/tmp
- New option (--one-file-system or -N) which tells taper not
to descend other filesystems
Changes
- In the docs, now specifies that taper is not really designed
for more than 30,000 files unless lots of memory is on hand
(this will be addressed in a future version)
- When doing a selective restore, does not keep on searching through
whole info file
- Workaround for "device busy" errors (problem with files not being
automatically closed on program termination)
- Aligns variables to 8 byte boundary (rather than 4 byte). To
accommodate 64 bit machines (ie. Alpha)
- Found a couple of more unaligned references
- Removed all references to longs
- Compiles cleanly - ie. no warnings
- Couple more log messages when reading in volume header
Bug Fixes
- Bug fix in string fields in forms
- Bug fix in automatically not sizing excluded directories
- If backing up file uncompressed, then was opening file read/write
- If problem compressing file, wasn't removing temporary files
resulting in /tmp left with lots of undeleted files
Release Date: ??
New
Changes
- Changed the # in the sgml to &num so that it would work
on postscript & html conversions
- If a directory is excluded, automatically doesn't size through
tree
- Can abort sizing of directories in selecting files for backup
Bug Fixes
- Fixed a few errors is sgml file
- Seg fault occassionally in unattended backup
- Properly prints message about directories/files not found in
unattended mode
- Totally closes file while getting next tape
- In menu, test mktape & test fast fsf were swapped
Release Date: 24-apr-96
New
- Compresses info files (can be turned off)
- Info files are now stored in little endian format and
converted as necessary so are portable between machines
- If for some reason taper seg faults, attempts to clean up -
ie. free memory & shared memory segments
Changes
- The magic number of volumes and tapes was changed to be a full
four byte magic number. This was because when using big endian
machines, taper was taking the zeros of the magic number to be
leading zeroes
- Also excludes .bmp files from compression by default
- When making code more ansi compliant, the length of filenames
became 1024 from 255. This resulted in significantly more
memory usage. Changed back to 255.
- Removed the proceeding . from all file names (ie. .taper_log -->
taper_log, .taper_info --> taper_info, .taper_prefs --> taper_prefs)
- As per ANSI, all references to inline removed
Bug Fixes
- If tape drive returned end of tape while doing mkinfo, tape size info
was sometimes not correctly restored
- Bug in using regular files with new intelligent restore
Release Date: 23-apr-96
New
Changes
Bug Fixes
- Problem compiling with gcc fixed
- Better handling of boundary code (porting issue)
Release Date: 22-apr-96
New
- New info file format - to accommodate more intelligent restoration
- More intelligent restoration - automatically skips to the correct tape
AND correct block for restoration - avoids those long reads before
getting to the file that you want
- New tape drive option - can_seek - TRUE if your drive supports a
seek operation, FALSE otherwise
- New utility for above - test can_seek
Changes
- If doing a normal restore and encounter a checksum error,
doesn't ask if end of backup - only asks when doing
recreate info, verify backup and full restore
- When compiling taper static, also compiles bg_restore & bg_backup
static
- Change make info to recreate info file in main menu
- Saving preferences done from another menu
- Removed test leading zeroes - not needed anymore
- fi.act_size reflects size of a soft link
- If checksum error for file, still restores the file (even though
it may be corrupt)
- Couple of changes to make source strictly ANSI (including removing
alloca function call)
- If reading multiple of block sizes, was reading an extra block
that was not required
- After a message box option is selected, the selected option is
printed in bold (poor man's hack of 3D push effect)
- If not compiled with triple buffering, doesn't print error/warning
counts in restore
Bug Fixes
- Major backups in restore when using memory-tight version
(introduced in 6.3 due to boundary code)
- Matched documentation and program on --sort-dirs option
- Bug in background restore/backup when triple buffering off
- Fixed a few cosmetic things with error handling
- Few bugs in non triple buffering code
- Few bugs with the memory tight version caused by boundary constraints
- Fixes up counts which were slightly off
- Bug if taper ran out of space on the very last block of the
tape
- When doing a verify, was starting log file with `restore'
- Serious bug fix - occurred in some instances when gcc was not
zeroing un-initialized variables
- Fixed static compiling problem
- Minor screen painting problem when prompting for new tapes
Release Date: 20-apr-96
New
Changes
- Prints a message to the log file if aborted backup
Bug Fixes
- Problem in preference file saving of x-tape and x-ntape
- In preference file handling, not properly handling preference
filename on some occassions
- When changing preferences, some string fields were not correctly
being changed
Release Date: 13-apr-96
NOTE My new address - yusuf@nagree.u-net.com
New
- Code added to support big endian machine. Taper writes all
32 bits as little endian to tape. Will convert this to
big endian if required - set the appropriate Makefile
option
- Pads strings in memory out to a multiple of 4 bytes - to help
ensure that structures only occur on 4 byte boundaries. For
porting to machines that require this
- time_t, uid_t, gid_t, dev_t are now hard coded - so that
archives will be more compatible accross different
architectures
- New option - --tape-size (-Z) allows you to specify the size
of a tape (in megabytes). When taper reaches this, automatically
assumes end of tape. For use with tape drives that have
non-standard end of tape handling. If set to 0 or -1, then
taper automatically handles end of tapes.
- Retry/Abort option if reading/writing to tape fails
- Full restore mode - if no info file found, asks whether the whole
archive should be restored
- Verify option - does a byte by byte compare of the disk file
and the tape file
- User allowed to abort when asking for new tape during backup -
of course, archive will be invalid
- If backup gets killed (power failure, user kills), doing a mkinfo
will attempt to recover the backup - if an illegal checksum
is encountered, the user will be asked if this means the
end of the backup (say yes if backup was killed)
Changes
- The double buffer is now a fixed size of 64K (hard coded) so
it doesn't have to be constantly allocated/reallocated with
changes in block size
- Also changed the buffer size to 32K for removable & regular
files
- Added a ranlib command to compress lib - faster linking
- Hacked gzip code a bit further to accommodate older C libraries
- Changed reference in makefile from /usr/src/linux/include/linux to
/usr/include/linux to accommodate those that have their linux
source tree is a non-standard location
- You must specify tape type on command line (or preference file) -
doesn't default to file type automatically
- Temporary files are given a name taper_xxxxx so that taper
files can be easily identified
- Separate programs for background compress & restore. They are
smaller than taper and use a lot less memory than taper. This
should result in less overall memory requirements than the
old way of forking of taper children
- If you have get_blksize option enabled, automatically enables
set_blksize
- Better handling of read/write errors
- Better handling of end of tape conditions
- If problem opening new tape in multi-tape backups, doesn't abort,
but reprompts
- Changed from signed --> unsigned to allow selections up to 4GB
- If mkinfo encounters an error, doesn't leave a half empty info file
- Errors while changing tapes are not counted as errors for the
error count
- Internal error message if inconsistency with memory allocation
- Excludes the log file from the backup
- Added ENODATA as another possibility for end of tape
Bug Fixes
- Even if you had log level set to 0, some log messages were being
written
- If a file grows while being backed up, does not cause backup integrity
to be violated. Only the particular file won't be complete.
- Major problems if end of tape occurred on an exact block boundary
- Fixed the unattended backup option which got broken somehow
and also added a few more messages into the mail message
- Bug with test_fastfsf and zftape causing seg faulting - basically,
if zftape returns a block count of 1, assumes that this is not
valid
- Not removing taper.8.gz in make uninstall
- Bug in color-selected preference
- Closes tape in check_tape now.
- Bug in preference file handling with tape specific options - clash
between regular files and ftape
- Conflict between --tape-overwrite and --tape command line options
therefore, --tape changed to --tape-name and --ntape changed to
--ntape-name
- If could only write < 64 bytes to new tape in multi-tape backup,
was seg faulting
- If only needed to write one block to a new tape in multiple tape
backups, was not doing this, but discarding the block.
- For zftape driver, was getting in infinite loop if couldn't get
tape header properly sometimes
- In mkinfo, was printing fatal error, when really wasn't a fatal
error (on advancing to last volume). Didn't affect mkinfo - just
a cosmetic problem with log file
Release Date: 16-jan-96
New
- Another compression method added - this is based on gzip - in
fact, most of the code is ripped straight out of the gzip
code. Advantage is that the whole file doesn't have to
be read into memory for compression - hence lower memory
usage - slight penalty on speed, of course.
Changes
- For compress 2, buffers are allocated at start of
taper instead of continually allocating/deallocating
- Doesn't refer to longs and ints etc.. They are all typedefed.
Now, when moving to another operating system, just have to
change typedefs.
- Tightened up memory a bit more - frees memory as soon as
it's not needed, rather than waiting to end of procedure
- Removed the LIBPATH=-L/usr/lib in the Makefile to avoid
signal 11 errors in some distributions
Bug Fixes
- Major bug in internal compression routines for files > 32K
- Files not being closed in backup routines on certain
errors
- Bug if archive only contained one file
Release Date: 16-jan-96
New
Changes
- Mentioned that need at least gcc 2.6.1 to compile
- Can use home/end keys in the menu
- More logging with regard to forking of children
- Removed superflous reading error messages
Bug Fixes
- In restore, was printing info messages to log file
even if log level set to errors only
- Problem if deleting exclude preferences with
residual space
- Divide by zero error in backup if didn't backup any files
- Problem is only files selected for backup and not directories
- Problem with files not appearing in restore windows because of
negative checksums
Release Date: 31-dec-95
New
- New utility checks to see if you have recursive links
Changes
- Now use the file info from the info file and not the tape
when restoring. Thus, if there's a problem with the
file info on tape, it can be overcome if you have an
intact info file. Also, uses volume header from info
file rather than tape.
- Use alloca for locally defined memory blocks. Less chance
of memory leaks
- In backup, when erasing tape, writes a null header so that
in future, tape is recognized as blank
Bug Fixes
- Saving taper.1 as taper.1 in man/cat8 therefore, man page
not being found - changed taper.1 to taper.8
- Made checksums absolute value to avoid problems with wrap
arounds
- Workaround to make it work with zftape 1.03
- Problem with the TRIPLE_BUFFERING system - SERIOUS bug
since backup integrity could be affected
- Not closing tape device in test fast fsf
Release Date: 31-dec-95
New
- Can exclude directories from the backup using the
--exclude-dirs (-R) options. It is case sensitive
and recursive. Default is "/tmp /usr/tmp /var/tmp".
- Can limit the size of log files via new preference. If
the log file is too big, the beginning of the log file
is removed. Preferences is --limit-log-file num (-L)
where num is the max number of megabytes (default 2)
the log file should be.
- Makefile target to allow making of a statically linked
taper for use in rescue disks
- New option in utilities menu - test make tape determines
whether your tape drive requires the use of make tape
Changes
- Made Makefile slightly more efficient
- Made recursively sizing directories a bit quicker
- In backup/restore selection, file sizes are now in KB
- Removed the missed memory segment message in log - wasn't an
error but was confusing too many people
- Man page in section 8 instead of section 1.
- Slight change in preference file handling to accommodate multiple
preferences for different tape drivers. See the section
Special preferences in the documentation for details
- Changed the default device names for zftape to qft0 & nqft0
- Changed the process_dir to a non-recursive routine - people
were running out of stack space on large directories
- Use the process_dir routine in backup
Bug Fixes
- Divide by zero error when writing stats to log if took
0 seconds for backup/mkinfo
- Bug if the temporary file directory was mounted on a different
device to the restore directory
- In mkinfo, closes the info file after use - should fix a lot of
problems
- Mkinfo prints the title line correctly
- Ignores errors on tape_fsf in mkinfo - if it gets an error,
assumes end of archive reached
- Mkinfo prints errors if unable to write to the info file
- Does a waitpid to prevent zombie children
- Invalid argument errors when doing a test_fastfsf
- In preference file, was always setting Y/N preferences to Y
- When saving preference to preference file, was ignoring any
name other than ~/.taper_prefs
- Bug in the handling of long Y/N options
- Bug in deleting selected entries in backup
- Bug if specifying preference file on command line
Release Date: 17-dec-95
New
- The ancillary programs have been merged with the main taper
program. Everything is accessed from the set of menus -
where_proc, testfast_fsf, testzero etc.. are all in
the utilities menu.
- The compile time settings for different tape drives have
been changed to runtime options - you just start taper
with the -T (--tape-type) option to use different tape
drives. Alternatively, you can set it in your preference
file or in the environment (TAPE_TYPE).
- You are now able to delete the last 'n' volumes on an
archive. The files are permanently removed.
- Most of the Makefile options have gone and are replaced by
run-time options.
- Colors can be set from command line - long names only
- Support for removable media including floppies
- At end of backup/restore/mkinfo, prints stats about backup and
also writes to the log
Changes
- Changed the exit key from preference menu to ESC (was F10)
- Major change in header file structures/organization - mainly to
make maintenance a bit easier
- Backup now checks to make sure that the archive you are appending
agrees with the tape in the drive.
- Change in the info file format to accommodate remountable/floppy
drives. Run mkinfo/check archive on all archives created prior
to version 6.0 - you do NOT have to re-backup.
- Major change in the background write code. Now it only forks
off one child - should help people who had problems with
running out of processes and virtual memory in 5.6
- The long command line options (GNU style) and the preference
file options are now the same. Most of the preference
file options have changed name. You will have to rebuild
any preference files you have.
- Lot of changes in code handling preferences. A lot easier to
add preferences etc.. now
- If have an illegal preference, prints an error
- Two new variables, have_rewind, have_fsf - should allow easier
addition of new backup devices
- If there's no tape in drive, will print an error message
before it lets you select files for backup
- If can't fork for a write, the parent will try and write
- Another hack to overcome a problem in zftape - to do with
block sizes when a new tape is inserted
Bug Fixes
- Problem in Makefile - not able to make taper.1 properly
- Plugged some shared memory leaks
- Exclude list was case sensitive
- Problems with children not closing the tape device so parent
was getting device busy/resource busy errors
- A few bug fixes in the multiple tape code
- Bug in restore caused it to hang on certain occassions -
cross use of _still_writing
- Error messages on setting links & permissions
- When printing archive directory to screen, was not printing
volume selections correctly. Also printing negative
volume numbers.
- Not printing archive differences with -A
- When changing preferences, if first line was a selection, was
not printing the selected option in reverse