SCO 2.2.1 tar question

[Mark Dornfeld]

In article <196 at ists> mike at ists (Mike Clarkson) writes:
>In article <508 at holos0.UUCP>, lbr at holos0.UUCP (Len Reed) writes:
>> in article <100 at pigs.UUCP>, haugj at pigs.UUCP (John F. Haugh II) says:
>> >
>> >> In article <8WQW5Ky00Vs8MSNUQN at andrew.cmu.edu> jl42+ at andrew.cmu.edu (Jay Mathew Libove) writes:
>> >> | Hi. I'm running SCO Xenix SysV/286 v2.2.1 on an IBM PC/AT clone and
>> >> | I am having a bit of a problem with "tar".
>> >> | I want to tar off a filesystem as:
>> >> |
>> >> | % tar cf - /pathname | compress | tar cfk /dev/rfd096ds9 720 -
>
>You don't really want to do this (trust me I know :-).  All flaming
>about who's capable of reading the F Manual aside, what you are trying
>to do is end up with one big compressed file split over n floppies. All
>it takes is one bit to flip and your entire archive is dead. Remember,
>compress has no error correction.  At least around here, we find
>floppies to be notoriously unreliable, and compress is most unforgiving.

I experimented with compressing tar backups on disk and
sending them to another system via uucp for backup.  In the
end I gave up because of frequent "directory checksum" errors
from tar. (Xenix 286 2.2.2). Mike, I agree with the
unreliability of this approach.  However, Jay's problem is
still there.

I found cpio to be extremely reliable and the compression
worked very well too, but in the end I gave up on the
compression and just send the cpio file over to the backup
system.

>> There must be better ways to get floppies with compressed archives.
>> I haven't used it, but perhaps "zoo" is what you want.
>
>I think what's really needed is a better tar, with error *correction*
>built in (CRC or the like).  Maybe someone could graft in a compression
>option that was specifically designed to be used with error correction.
>True it would cost you some space, but it would be worth it.
>See the discussion in comp.sources.d.
 
There is an "improved" version of tar available from a third
(fourth??) party called   "ctar" which has file compression as
an option. .....damn, the reference is at the office.

Please mail to me, and I'll send the reference out if anyone
wants it.

Mark T. Dornfeld
Royal Ontario Museum
100 Queens Park
Toronto, Ontario, CANADA
M5S 2C6

mark at utgpu!rom      - or -     romwa at utgpu