tar | compress

[Guy Lemieux]

In <5875 at stpstn.UUCP> lerman at stpstn.UUCP (Ken Lerman) writes:

>In article <28498 at usc> kjh at pollux.usc.edu (Kenneth J. Hendrickson) writes:
>->If you do a backup with tar, and pipe the output through compress before
>->writing it on the disk or tape, and ...
>->
>->	if there is a single bit error on the tape,
>->	then you could loose all the files in your backup from that
>->		point until the end.
>->
>->If you don't use compress, and there is a single bit error, you won't
>->have that problem, but you will require many more disks or tapes.
>->
>->--
>->
>->So what do people do?  Do you trust your disks/tapes and use compress?
>->
>->-- 
>->  favourite oxymorons:  student athlete, honest politician, civil war
>->Ken Hendrickson N8DGN/6       kjh at usc.edu      ...!uunet!usc!pollux!kjh

>Of course, an alternative is to compress your files first and then
>backup using tar.

>I would not consider a compressed tar file to be a viable backup.

Another alternative is to tar groups of files into one file on the hard disk,
compress the tar file, and then tar the resultant file.tar.Z.

Just my $0.02

--
Guy Lemieux          ENG SCI                          University of Toronto
guy at contact.uucp      9 T 2      Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering
--
As they say about Intel's brilliant efforts at fudging benchmarks:
-- "If these guys are so smart, why don't they just make faster machines?"