[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Riku Saikkonen) writes: > "Gary Hennigan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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
