Hello. I have large tar.gz packages in archive DVDs. What if the file gets corrupted? Is the whole file useless? For example, what happens if one byte is altered short after the begin?
It looks like somebody should design and implement a robust package format in any case. Some observations: -zcat seems to not recognize compression if the begin is cut off -tar cannot find the file headers even we would have gziprecover/bzip2recover If tar.gz and tar.bz2 are a far from robust, should I use zip, rar, 7z packages? Probably not, because cutting off two bytes at the end of a zip package made the whole zip file useless. The two bytes at the end had no real use as I recovered the file by taking the two bytes from another zip package. Most likely rar, 7z and other formats are as fragile as zip. I have some design notes for better tar.gz/bz2: -gzip equipped with bzip2 style blocks -tar aligned to bzip2 style blocks -start of each tar-block would contain header which tells what file and at what offset the data (at the begin of the block) belongs to For example, if I pack multiple audiofiles to tar.gz and shoot the disc with a shotgun, I'm able to recover pieces of the audiofiles at the correct offsets: audio.wav ------AAAA-----AAAA----AAAAAAAA-----------AAAAAA--AAAAAAA where A is correctly recovered audio and -- are unrecoverable audio. Juhana
