Re: Regarding tar and split
David Brodbeck <brodbd@u.washington.edu> writes:
> On Oct 11, 2007, at 5:01 AM, Sean Zimmermann wrote:
> > If I ignored the indexing issue (since most of my work with tar is
> > large,
> > non-incremental backups where I typically restore the entire
> > contents -
> > it would be nice if there was indexing, but is not a huge problem),
> > should I still use something other than tar?
>
> The answer is a resounding "maybe." cpio has some advantages over
> tar when doing compressed backups. It compresses each file
> individually, instead of compressing the entire archive. This makes
> a big difference for data recovery. If part of a compressed tar
> archive gets corrupted, you'll probably lose the whole thing. If
> part of a compressed cpio archive gets corrupted, you'll lose only
> the individual files affected by the corruption. This was probably
> more of a concern back in the days when we all backed up to tape, but
> bad hard disk sectors and scratched DVD-Rs do happen.
>
> cpio has a really horrid command line syntax, though. ;)
Are you sure that you are not talking about afio? I looked at the
documentation for cpio, and there is no mention of compression (for
etch).
--
Carl Johnson carlj@peak.org
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