Ok, I apologize for this because I know you really don't want to hear it, but first I feel compelled to give you this obligatory piece of too-late-to-use advice: "You should verify backup procedures before you need them."
I also note that if you're going to compress the file with bzip2 anyway, it's not clear that using the sparse option to tar is going to help much. I don't really know, because it's not an option I've ever used. And I know very little about NTFS volumes, though that probably doesn't matter. Let me help with what I can. There is an archive at snapshot.debian.net that will allow you to go find out which package versions were current in unstable on any date in history, and retrieve that version to try on your system. Getting at which version was in testing on any given date is a little bit harder, but the PTS at http://packages.qa.debian.org/t/tar.html has a log of "Latest News" about tar that includes the date different versions migrated to testing. On your own system, you can look at /var/log/dpkg.log* and/or /var/log/aptitude* for info on when you installed various versions of things. I hope that helps! It's certainly worth trying a couple of different versions of tar to extract the file, but beyond that I'm not entirely sure what to suggest. Bdale -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
