Re: Tape backup software?

[rjs@isil.lloke.dna.fi (Riku Saikkonen)]

"Gary Hennigan" <glhenni@sandia.gov> writes:
>There's at least one issue with tar that's kept me from using it, you
>don't want to use software compression with tar. Tar compresses
>globally, which means that the whole of the archive is considered one
>big compressed file. If something happens to the beginning of the tape
>you wouldn't be able to recover any of the data on that tape. This is

This depends on what you compress with. Gzip can't recover if there is
an error, but the manual page of bzip2 says that it "may" be able to
recover everything but a 900 Kb block around the error. (The block
size 900 Kb seems to be configurable via a command-line option to the
compressor.)

Has anyone tried recovering damaged .tar.bz2 files? Any success /
failure?


(By the way, there is also afio, which is a command-line tool like tar
but compresses one file at a time. The format, of course, isn't
compatible with tar, and afio isn't as widely available on rescue
disks, other Unices, and such.)

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