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Re: crossplatform multi-cd archives



On Thu, 2003-05-08 at 21:07, Jesse Meyer wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Today, I was faced with the problems of archiving a few directories
> one a debian woody server to CDs.  The server is connected via samba to
> a windows machine with a burner, so burning the CDs is not an issue.  
> However, I was faced with the problem of splitting the archives across
> several CDs, in such a way for the archives to be easily accessable from
> a typical windows or linux machine.
> 
> Since winzip can extract tar files, tar seems to be the easy way of 
> making a crossplatform backup, accessable from both linux and windows.  
> `tar -c -L 665600 -f archive.1.tar -f archive.2.tar -f archive.3.tar
> -f archive.4.tar -f archive.5.tar -f archive.6.tar ... dir1 dir2
> dir3 ...` will break up the directories into 650MB files, which can be 
> extracted from a windows machine.
> 
> However, *no* compression takes place, which makes this process rather
> wasteful.  I can tar and compress the files first, piping to standard
> output, then use split to split the files, but unarchiving them then
> requires the knowledge of arcane DOS commands, as well as all of the
> CDs.  zipsplit also looks promising, but seems to require the creation
> of the zipfile first, which then becomes very disk-space intensive.

Also a bit temporarily wasteful, but:
# tar -c -L 665600 -f archive.1.tar -f archive.2.tar -f archive.3.tar \
     -f archive.4.tar -f archive.5.tar -f archive.6.tar ... dir1 dir2 \
     dir3 ...
# gzip archive.*.tar

Depending on the compressibility of the data, you could then increase
the --tape-length so that the tar.gz files are ~650MB.

One other thing.  You say that there is no compression, but I don't
see a -z or -j on your tar command line...

-- 
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| Ron Johnson, Jr.        mailto:ron.l.johnson@cox.net          |
| Jefferson, LA  USA      http://members.cox.net/ron.l.johnson  |
|                                                               |
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