On Sun, Aug 12, 2001 at 02:46:42AM -0700, patrick q wrote: > Hi, > > I have a lot of important archives, up to 10,000 files per ~10 Meg > tar.gz tarball, that I like to keep as safe as possible. > > I test the archives when I create them, have backups, and off-site > backups of backups, but I am worried about possible file corruption, ie > propagating possibly corrupt files through the backup rotation. > > Would it not be better to compress the files individually first and > then tar them into an archive instead of the normal tar.gz operation, > to have the best chance of recovering as many files as possible? >
Compress files individually. Afio does this, and it is the basis for the tob (Tape Oriented Backup) utility. The following command should give you a place to start: afio -Zvo -b 10k <backup device> < filelist See the man pages for further info. You can tar these all together once compressed. The problem with tar is that if there is an error in a tar archive, everything beyond that point is lost. Paul
