Re: Tape backup software?
rjs@isil.lloke.dna.fi (Riku Saikkonen) writes:
> "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.)
Which was mentioned in my original post, and conveniently snipped from
what you copied in to your post. ;)
Personally I like afbackup. Not too difficult to configure, and once
installed you can almost totally forget about it. It also has a
file-at-a-time compression scheme so my old 4mm, sans hardware
compression, is more usable. Of course I have a small LAN in my home
and afbackup is a client-server system well suited to working on a
LAN. The trouble to set it up may not be worth it for a stand-alone
system.
The drawback is that afbackup might not be as portable as even afio
and might not fit on a rescue floppy. Neither of which is an issue for
me since I use a CD-R and a boot floppy for my rescue needs and I'd
have no need to restore the backed up data from my home PC's to an
outside system.
I've also used "dump" on a lot of Unix systems. Unfortunately the last
time I tried the GNU/Linux version it wouldn't back up FAT partitions
and so wasn't suited to my needs.
Gary
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