On Wed, Jul 23, 2003 at 09:23:41PM -0500, Alec Berryman wrote: > On Wed, 2003-07-23 at 19:40, Vano D wrote: > > > Note that I split the thing into 640 megs so I can store it into a CDROM > > and that I make the filename with the date extension. > > Dumb question: I'm new to split; can you untar each split file > individually, or do you need to do them in sequence like a split RAR?
Even worse than that. Split is a totally separate program, it does what it sounds like; takes file <A> and chomps it up into pieces <A>.1, <A>.2, etc. Tar have no idea about this. It will happily read your first file <A>.1 and when it reaches the end of that file, it will stop there, complaining about the broken archive. If you /haven't/ compressed the archive, you /might/ be able to take one of the split files and extract files from it, but you /WILL/ loose the first file in the archive (actually, the one that got split between this split file and the previous). If you compressed the archive, you won't be able to read anything from the split files, unless of course you have the first one. Do make tar read the split files again, you just: 'cat <A>.1 <A>.2 <A>.3 > <A>' and voila, you can unpack the <A> file. This is one of the biggest reason why you shouldn't compress backup data. Say that you burned the <A>.2 file on CD and either the burning process, the media, or the reading of that file has gone bad. You've had that happened to you, haven't you? ;) Now, /atleast/ all files in the archive <A>.3 is gone... Probably more. Tar can't recover from an error in the compressed archive. However, if it's an uncompressed archive, you'd just loose the one file that went wrong... Remember, noone cares if you do backups. It's if you can restore that matters. :) //H -- To segfault is human; to bluescreen moronic. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
