    Backflops is the name of a suite of 4 utilities, all operating
as links to one executable, for backing up and restoring data
on Linux machines to floppy disks.  
    All the pertinent info is in backflop.doc. Be sure to run
"backflops -u" for the usage message, which is complete with examples.

Raison d'etre - general:
    The GNU tar utility can do automatic compression of archives. It
also has the capability to write to floppies and to split large archives
across multiple volumes. Backflops uses tar, at least by default.
So why is it needed? Because GNU tar cannot both compress and
split volumes at the same time. Thus, if you want compression, you
need to send the compressed output of tar to stdout and pipe it through
another utility that does the splitting.
    Backflops does not depend on any GNU tar features, so it should
work equally well with pax/tar, though this is not tested. But you
will either have to use the -x flag or recompile it with GNU_TAR
turned off if you'll be using it with a non-GNU tar.

Raison d'etre - particular:
    There are at least two other tools with a similar mission for Linux
alone: floptools and disksplit. Why is backflops needed? Well, I used
floptools, which is a few shell scripts, and it had a number of rough
edges. Even the README from the author (bet@internet.sbi.com
(Bennett E. Todd)) says "This is some vile, yucko throwaway code.
I suspect it should be completely rewritten in perl." So I rewrote
it (but in C, not perl; maybe I should have used perl). I rewrote
it largely for myself, because rough edges make me nervous when
backing up important data.
    At that time I didn't even know of the existence of disksplit.
But since then I took a look at it, and decided backflops still
has more bells and whistles, and fewer rough edges, and is more
flexible, than disksplit.  So I'm making this one available too. 
If you're looking for a backup utility, take a look at all three
("egrep -i 'backflops|floptools|disksplit'" in a file list
from tsx-11 or somewhere) and choose what you like.

Raison d'etre - future:
    Someday maybe Linux will have full, incremental/interactive
backup/restore utilities and all these solutions will be used
to wrap fish.

Installing:
    Typing 'make install' will place the supplied binary
in /usr/local/bin and make the appropriate links to it.
Then rehash and run "backflops -u" to see a usage message
with examples.
    Note that the supplied binary is linked static. You may wish
to relink it shared. Since the 'install' target does not depend
on the 'all' target, you should touch the .c file and remove the
setting of LDFLAGS in the Makefile, then do a 'make' followed by 
a 'make install'.

Send bugs, fixes, improvements, comments to
dsb@world.std.com
