tar (was: Re: Article on data rot on CD's)

From: Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk_at_yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Thu Jul 29 05:28:12 2004

On Wed, 2004-07-28 at 21:45, Brad Parker wrote:
> jjd wrote:
> >On Wed, 2004-07-28 at 16:14, Doc Shipley wrote:
> >> Paul Koning wrote:
> >> and the backup software junked.
> >
> >I laugh at those who criticized me for backing up my system with tar :)
>
> it's funny, tar seems to be the one thing that still works, despite many other
> pieces of backup software (and even compression programs)...

Indeed. Doesn't tar have issues over 2GB archive sizes though, where
each vendor introduced their own proprietary extensions to allow it to
cope? I'm sure I recall something about that a few years ago, but I'm
not sure what the 'real' problems are.

I'm not sure what the pathname length limit is for tar either (and
whether it's platform-specific). Only reason I mention that is because I
archived my mail folders (Evolution, Redhat 9) a few weeks ago using tar
in verbose mode, and it was truncating some of the file/pathnames *on
screen*. I don't know if it was doing the same for the actual files or
not as I ended up creating the archive from a directory closer to the
actual data I was archiving, so the paths weren't quite as long. Seeing
stuff truncated was a little disconcerting though if it was actually
doing the same to archive files - I'm sure lots of people use tar
without the verbose switch...

Anyone got any pointers to a good site stating the different limitations
of tar for different vendors / releases? For peace of mind I'd like to
know that my enormous archive created on system bar will work on system
foo in ten years time... :-)

cheers

Jules
Received on Thu Jul 29 2004 - 05:28:12 BST