[Techtalk] backup - tar

[Almut Behrens]

On Wed, Sep 01, 2004 at 04:15:07PM -0700, Maria McKinley wrote:
> (...)
> data I want backed up does not fit on one tape.  Right now I backup 
> different parts of the system on different nights by cron (now it is 
> spread out even more than before, since I have stopped using zip to 
> compress!).

...as I feel at least partially responsible for having caused you this
inconvenience ;)  I'd like to mention a slightly less-known utility,
which can do compression on a _per-file_ basis, thus making things
safer WRT potentially corrupted data than compressing the whole stream.
It's called afio.  Citing from its docs:

  "Like tar, afio can make compressed archives.  However,  the com­
  pressed  archives  produced  by  afio  are much safer than tar -z
  archives.  If a tar -z archive has a read error, tar is unable to
  extract the files beyond this error.  The compressed archive for­
  mat used by afio allows it to recover from read errors and go  on
  unpacking the next file."

See the manpage for all other details and example usages.
Debian packages are readily available (and certainly RPMs, too...).

Cheers,
Almut