Re: best practice for tar and gzip?
On Sun, Aug 12, 2001 at 02:46:42AM -0700, patrick q wrote:
>
> Would it not be better to compress the files individually first and
> then tar them into an archive instead of the normal tar.gz operation,
> to have the best chance of recovering as many files as possible?
The best would be not to pack the files at all. The better alternative
would be to pack the files individually and then tar them, as you
said. And, as you already are aware of, if you gzip the tarred file,
you risk loosing most of the files in the archive.
It depends on how big your files are. If all of them are 100bytes big,
you will not gain as much gzipping 1000 of them, as you would with
gzipping the 100*1000 tar-file.
If you MUST gzip them, and HAVE to gzip the tar-archive because of
size-issues, make sure you always test the tar-file after the copying,
and every once in a while for medium errors. It seemed like you had
several copies of the tar-files too, so if one of them would get a
error, you can copy it from the other location.
The testing can be done with MD5, I suppose, to save processing power,
instead of 'tar tzf'.
Sorry if I did not help that much, just repeating your questions as
answers. :)
//Fredde
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