Reminds me of a client's system I was on a few years ago. They had a backup script on their server that was written some time in the 90's by the looks of it. U

Reminds me of a client's system I was on a few years ago. They had a backup script on their server that was written some time in the 90's by the looks of it. Used ye old `cpio` command to write to a tape drive; someone's job was to manually go and eject the tape every morning and replace it. For verification, the script simply checked the exit status of the cpio command, and if it returned 0, it wrote "BACKUP STATUS: SUCCESSFUL"-- or 'BACKUP STATUS: BAD" if non-zero--to a log and sent an email. At some point we had to try to restore something, and spent several hours trying to figure out why their backup tape was empty. Some quick digging into the script discovered that the command would indeed write some kind of tarball to the backup tape, it was just zero bytes. IIRC, I eventually traced it to some problem with the cpio command erroring out if it tried to copy a file larger than 4GB. Suffice to say, the client was a little shaken that they had gone god-knows-how-many-months without an actual backup.