At Mon, 6 Feb 2012 16:04:18 -0500, Alan McKay wrote: > > > I don't think so - I'm fairly sure I've seen GNUtar complain about bad > > headers, say 'skipping to next header' and then find something. It > > won't do that if you used the -z option because you generally can't > > recover from errors in compression > > > > > Bam! As an aside to my current line of questioning, I was looking for an > excuse not to compress and you just gave it to me! Yay! > > Compressing makes it nigh impossible to know whether or not the data will > fit on the tape without doing a test compress ahead of time, which can take > several hours depending on the amount of data. My experience with tapes ended shortly after DAT tape appeared (used 1/4" then 8mm), so this may be out of date; however, I associate tape backups of disk partitions with dump(8), restore(8), and rmt(8), along with cpio(1) for data files. Some shared software used to come on 1/4" tape in tar format. The only compression I recall (vaguely) was standard ("POSIX" on GNU/Linux) compress(1P). Anyway, I would never put non-standard compression on tape that might be used on a different POSIX system. - Greg Greg Peterson <peterson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos