tar or cpio?

[Lenny Tropiano]

In article <556 at gtx.com> al at gtx.UUCP (Al Filipski 839-0732) writes:
|> [... reply to a question on the POSIX standards of cpio or tar ...]
|>
|>I too would like to know if such information is available.  I once did
|>a cpio backup onto multiple floppies (AT&T 3B1), and when I tried to
|>restore,  I had a hard read error on one of the floppies, early on in
|>the sequence.  Luckily, I had the information elsewhere.  Would there
|>have been any way to bypass the bad floppy and continue the restore?
|>Where can one get a document describing cpio format?
|>
|>

What you need to get is a program that was posted to the net a while
back, it was called "afio".  I think it was in comp.sources.unix 
(check with your local archive site).  It was a program that acted just
like cpio, but nicely skipped bad records and jumped to next ASCii header 
record (as long as you used the "-c" option to cpio or afio) and continued
with that file.   This means if you have a bad floppy, you might loose
one file if there is some bad data.  This also allows for starting at backup
disk #50 is you like (any disk) and skip to the first good header.

Nice program!  Very useful, especially if you backup on floppy.  The
program has an option to compile it with -DCTC3B2 (for 3B2 cartridge tape).


						-Lenny
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