Major changes in taper 6.9 -------------------------- * Major change in info structure resulting in smaller and quicker info files * Fixes a problem with incremental backups * Fixes seg faulting under Red Hat 5.2 and kernel 2.2.x * Fixes a problem with unattended backups Major changes in taper 6.8.1 ---------------------------- * Ability to select which files to exclude from the backup * Major performance improvements * Screen only updates once every second rather than for every file - speeds up taper * Support for tape drives that don't handle end of tape condition properly * Supports glibc (aka lib6) * Attempt recovery module within utils for corrupt archives * Able to use networked drives like tar (eg. myhost.com:/dev/tape) * When processing info file for restore, only processes once so much quicker plus pre-processes most recent restore so faster during restore selections * Uses m-tree indexed info files so that the info data is not stored in memory, hence system load and memory usage has plummetted. Results in four info files per archive - base, data and two index files. The index files do not need to be saved since they can be regenerated with a new utility - reindex info file * New option - --size-dirs : allows you turn of sizing of directories while selecting files for backup * New option - --unattended-id : when doing an unattended backup, allows you to specify which archive to add a backup to. If that tape is not in the drive, the backup is aborted. * Get file details in backup & restore windows * Able to search archive for a particular file * Able to search disk directory for a particular file * Able to jump to a particular directory in backup or restore * Long filenames are handled better - like midnight commander * Few changes to user interface for more consistency : see changes file for details * Few bug fixes including in auto-detecting end of tape Major changes in taper 6.7.4 ---------------------------- * Handling seeking on drives that number blocks from 1, rather than 0 Common symptom was taper reporting drive couldn't seek when it actually could * New preference : min-before-seek : specifies minimum number of blocks the tape needs to be advanced before taper will issue a seek command. Otherwise, continues streaming * Can select root directory in backup * Problems with multiple tape handling fixed * Can browse archives without having a tape in the tape drive * Use of pipes in co-ordinating children with triple buffering: should help system load * Loads of minor changes and bug fixes Major changes in taper 6.7 -------------------------- * New option - --old-archive which allows you to use archives created by taper versions 5.0 --> 5.6 with 6.7 * New option - --min-free which specifies how much free space should be on filesystem before background compress is attempted * Error messages printed in background children cannot start * Fixes to allow taper to be used with C libraries 5.3.x * Default mailing program changed from deliver to mail * Few bug fixes including : not always removing all temporary files, background children not using temp directory properly, unattended backup problem, multi-volume single directory restores Major changes in taper 6.6 -------------------------- * New option --tmp-dir specifies where temporary files should be stored * New option --one-file-system tells taper to not descend directories that are on other filesystems * Few more issues for porting * Bug fix for device busy errors and few other minor bug fixes Major changes in taper 6.5 -------------------------- * Added support for compression of info files - on by default. Change in backup preferences * Code is now strictly ANSI compliant * Removed leading `.' from all taper files - ie. .taper_prefs --> taper_prefs, .taper_info --> taper_info, .taper_log --> taper_log * Info file is now in little endian format so it should be portable accross different architectures * If segfaults, cleans up memory before exiting if possible Major changes in taper 6.4 -------------------------- * Restore is much more intelligent now and uses the seek ioctl where available. This should speed up restoration a lot especially where you are only restoring a few files (relative to the number on the archive) that are scattered on the archive * Restore will prompt for the tape on which the first file it needs to restore is on, rather than the tape on which the archive was commenced * Lots of bug fixes related to the memory tight option Major changes in taper 6.3 -------------------------- * Added new preference, --tape-size for telling taper the size of your tape drive. Value of 0 tells taper to auto-detect end of tape * Full restore mode that doesn't need an info file * Verify mode to do a byte by byte compare of tape file & disk files * Uses two ancillary programs to avoid forking off taper children - better memory usage * Retry/Abort option if error reading/writing to tape * Fixed the unattended backup mode (I hope) * Support for big endian machines and machine independant archives * Support for 4 byte boundary structures * Change in preference file/command line options: --tape --> --tape-name --ntape --> --ntape-name * Attempt at recovery if backup was killed by power failure (or kill) * Lots of little bug fixes and little improvements Major changes in taper 6.2 -------------------------- * A new compression methods added - an internal gzip type * Original internal compression routine made much more memory efficient * Utility to check for recursive links * Major backup bug corrected with files > 32K being compressed - spurious bug and also with buffers being flushed to drive in the wrong order (rare bug) Major changes in Taper 6.1 -------------------------- * The ability to automatically exclude directories in the backup (eg. /tmp and /usr/tmp) * New utility to test if your tape drive needs tapes to be prepared with Make tape before use * Limit the size the log file can grow to * Lot of bug fixes, including one major one where files were disappearing after running mkinfo/check archive Major changes in Taper 6.0 -------------------------- * All the ancillary programs have been merged into the main taper menu under utilities * Can erase the last 'n' volumes of an archive * Makefile options replaced by command line - don't need separate tapers for SCSI, zftape and ftape. Similarly, don't need separate memory tight and normal versions * Preference file and command line preferences have the same name (the names of some preference file options have changed) * Support for removable media such as floppy drives and ZIP drives * Change in the background write processing. Help people who had limited memory and were getting virtual memory exhaustion and/or running out of processes * There has been a change in the info file format. This doesn't affect your archives, just the info files. You must run mkinfo/check archive on all archives run prior to version 6.0 to update the info file * Problem zftape users were getting with Unknown tape errors has been fixed * Multitude of minor changes and bug fixes Major changes in Taper 5.6 -------------------------- * New, very efficient, triple buffering process for backups. * An internal compression routine. This is not as efficient as gzip, but much much faster. You can still opt to use gzip via the compress-type (COMPRESS_TYPE) option * The buffering, combined with internal compression produces a very much improved performance on backups * Uncompressing of files in restore is done in the background so restore performance is also much better * Backups can be cleanly interrupted without affecting archive integrity. Press Q or q while backing up. Major changes in Taper 5.5 -------------------------- * Support for latest version of zftape - v1.02 including using the new GET_BLKSIZE ioctl. This means that you don't have to worry about what block size an archive was made with - taper automatically works it out. Also overcomes some problems with the interaction between taper and zftape-1.02 * You can unselect a file from the top left windows in backup and restore by pressing 'u'. You can still unselect from the file selection window as well * Couple of minor bug fixes Major changes in Taper 5.4 -------------------------- * Support for the new zftape driver added - improved version of the ftape driver. * Support for quick fast forwards for tape drives that support it (zftape, and most SCSIs) * Absolute fixed block writing & reading to the tape * Unattended backups * Couple of minor bugs fixed Major changes in Taper 5.3 -------------------------- * New option (--archive-diff) allows you to print the files that have changed since an archive was made. * You can now select files for backup and restore from the top right window (what's currently on the archive window) Major changes in Taper 5.2 -------------------------- * When backing up using compression, now sets up a background process to compress files, resulting in faster throughput to tape. * Much faster at calculating directory sizes * Much faster handling of most recent restore option. The downside is that the most recent file is assumed to be on the most recent volume. This is the case 99.999% of the time, but very rarely, for some reason, an old version of a file may be on a later volume. If this is the case, taper won't pick it up - you'll have to do it manually. * Linuxdoc-sgml is used for documentation so that a postscript, info, tex or html doc file can be generated. A plain ASCII text file (as well as SGML source file) is supplied so that people without the linuxdoc-sgml package can still have some documentation. * An option in the Makefile allows you to compile either a fast but memory & resource hungry taper, or a slower but much less of a memory demanding program. * Less allocation and reallocation of memory blocks resulting in improved performance and reduced system load * Will create the file set directory if it doesn't exist * When doing a restore on a particular volume, will not show empty directories but descend straight to a directory that has entries in it. Can be over-ridden with a new option (--auto-descend) * Major backup bug corrected. * You can print the directory of any archive, not just the archive of the tape currently in the tape drive * Major restore bug fixed with regard to missing volumes * In restore, when selecting a directory, will calculate the directory size taking into account most recent restore. * The usual bug fixes & minor changes (see CHANGES file for details) Major changes in Taper 5.1 -------------------------- * You now need ncurses v1.9.6 with the forms library * File sets now supported * New options --exclude-files - excludes a particular class of files from the backup (eg. .o files) * New option --exclude-compress stops compression on certain types of files (eg. .gz, .Z .gif) * Man page * Able to give volume and archive title just prior to backup rather than having to specify on command line * The usual bug fixes & minor changes (see CHANGES file for details) Major changes in Taper 5.0 -------------------------- * Information stored about each volume - when it was backed up, what was backed up etc.. * Support for incremental backups totally overhauled * More intelligent restore - if multiple copies of the same file are on an archive, taper will automatically restore only the most recent file (can be overriden) * Able to restore directories & devices without the tape - information from info file is used * Preferences can be changed within the program and then saved to a preference file or to a shell command line * One program only instead of three - menu selection for the appropriate program * Able to see all the archives made regardless of whether the particular tape is in the drive * Lots of other changes and bug fixes (see CHANGES file for details) $Id: MAJOR_CHANGES,v 1.11 2000/10/20 01:40:34 yusuf Exp $