On Wed, 25 Jan 2017, Nico de Jong wrote: > I did some research, and the most reasonable outcome was that it was not > possible by normal means, because some algorithm reading synchronisation > data couldnt find out what was happening, so, the backup was ruined.....
Odd. This would imply you couldn't wind a tape past a medium error and read what's behind, but I surely did it a couple of times with DDS tapes. And this is exactly why I gave up on some proprietary (OSF/1 IIRC) `dump' utility as it recorded an archive directory at the beginning making the whole archive unusable if an error developed there. OTOH `tar' keeps file information along with actual data spreading it across the archive, so any medium error only causes the immediately affected file to be lost. Same with `cpio' (except for the arcane CLI). Maciej
