On 12/26/2010 11:40 AM, [email protected] wrote: > The -r option is extactly what I want since with it the tar appends to end of > archive.
OK, but you're wearing out the tape drive unnecessarily, since it reads the whole tape. It'd be much faster to seek to the end of the file on the tape, go back two blocks (for tar's EOF marker), and then start tar from there. And it'd be even faster simply to append a new tar image to the tape, so that the tape contains multiple files. Anyway, I suspect your tape got polluted with a ustar-format archive; perhaps you used another version of tar, or tar with some unusual options, to create it in the first place; or maybe it just had some leftover data on it that happened to look like a ustar-format archive. To avoid this problem in the future, please make sure you use 'tar -c' the first time you write to the tape, and use 'tar -r' only after the tape is safely initialized.
