Pls accept my apology for late late summary. Here is my original question:
>I am restoring a 7GB user data from a 8mm tape drive to the RAID 5
>disk (configured by DiskSuite 4.0) under single user mode on a Sparc 20
>w/ Solaris 2.4 system, and it is now still not yet finished!!! I can
>still see files are being extracted on the screen (I used ufsrestore
>-vrf /dev/rmt/2h).
>
>I didn't sleep last night just to monitor the backup, and I am starting
>to panic now. Any suggestion?
The restoration was finally completed after around 48 hour and I am still
not sure what is the cause! All I can think is the tape drive is not quite
compatible - the original tape drive I used to do daily full backup is
a Exabyte 8505, the one I used to restore data was Exabyte 8505XL (When I first
started to restore the backup data, the original Exabyte 8505 tape drive ate
my tape and then I changed to use the Exabyte 8505XL).
Thanks to Frode Stromsvag, Danny Johnson, David Fetrow, Rich Kulawiec,
Mark Henderson, and Jeff Wasilko. Mark and Jeff both mention a program
for faster restoration. Here is what Jeff said in his email:
> Raid 5 writes are very slow. File creation on a regular disk is
> considered slow as well. So, you are doubly cursed.
>
> Casper Dik wrote a small program that enables fast writes on
> filesystem. This is dangerous for production (a crash or
> powerfail will leave the filesystem corrupted and unfixable by
> fsck), but it is useful for restoring filesystems.
>
> You can get it at: http://www.smoe.org/~jeffw/fastfs.c
I haven't tried it yet but it is good to let others know of such program.
I have also tried on Exabyte home page and its discussion group but
to no value.
Best Rgds,
Lincoln Chang
System Administrator
Philips Semiconductors