Hi!
Trying to kill the keyboard, [EMAIL PROTECTED] produced:
> On Mon, 20 Sep 1999, Douglas Bollinger wrote:
> > Second, and most importantly, is that using compression
> > on a tar backup could result in total data loss in a archive after a bad
> > spot in the tape, whereas going without compression should only result in
> > losing the file with the bad tape sector.
> How easy are these other backup systems to implement? Are any of them Open
> Source like tar? The advantage of tarballs is that any linux box can read
> them.
Afio. Not GNU, but Freeware. Source code aviable.
Manpage says:
Note that afio archives are portable, as they contain only
ASCII-formatted header information. They are also compatible
with ASCII cpio(1) archives (ala cpio -c, for GNU cpio(1)
also cpio -H odc).
It compresses on a per file basis, so bitrot will still
get only the files that have damaged bits. You can also
read compressed files back with cpio (they'll have a .Z
at the end) and decompress them with gunzip (or whatever
compressor/encryptor you cared to use).
Basically, you do a
find / /usr /home /var /usr/spool/news ... -xdev -print0 |
afio -o0Z ... /dev/tape
(note you may need some more options, like block size ...)
for writing[1] and a
cd /; afio -rZ /dev/tape
for comparing and a
cd /; afio -iZ /dev/tape
for installing an archive.
Be warned however, afio does *not* like being overwritten or
having gzip overwritten during operation.[2] (You should
install such basic archives from a rescue system, which would
be wise for other reasons as well).
-Wolfgang
[1] I'd use a different archive for every partition.
[2] AFAIK that crashes afio and leaves the binaries unusable.
I'd think the same might be true for tar & co.
