Re: --sequential-read not sequential???

> Well, this is my turn to be confuse as I don't see how either 'rm'
> 'echo' or 'gpg' can lead the copy of each slice from the NAS... anyway
> that's not the issue here...

:-) gpg reads the requested encrypted slice using NFS and decrypts it
into the tmp directory...

>> This seems to work. I get the following output at the end, which I 
>> presume means success (a simple yes/no summary of the --test would
>> be nice to add, by the way :-) ):
> 
> I let you refer to the answer just provided by Andy for that point.

Sure, I check the status in the script. But I still think the output is
not as user-friendly as it could be... but not the issue here

>> Shouldn't --sequential-read prevent that? Or am I misunderstanding
>> how it works?
> 
> I would add -vm option to see more about what does...

Thanks. I will take a look with -vm.

> the --sequential-read option lead dar to be suitable to read an
> archive from a pipe. If for some reason (corruption, dirty file, etc.)
> it need to skip back or forward it tries to do so. If that fails
> because the system refused, it continues as if it had not requested to
> skipped. The reason why skipping is needed should show with -vm
> option. This may lead
> to request an other slice.
> 
> You can do exactly what you want by mean of dar_form with dar:
> 
> dar_xform -E 'rm "%p/%b."*".%e"' \
>  	  -E "echo Fetching $dir/%b.%n.%e.gpg..." \
>  	  -E "gpg -d -q -o '%p/%b.%n.%e' --batch  '$dir/%b.%n.%e.gpg'" \
> 	  /var/tmp/$archive - | dar -t - --sequential-read
> 
> dar_xform will read sequentially the archive and build a single sliced
> archive from the sliced one which will be output to its stdout and
> consumed immediately by dar (nothing stored on disk). Dar will have no
> choice than to read sequentially, though there is a caching layer
> inside dar that can allow dar to skip backward a little, but this is
> transparent to you.

Thanks. I will take a look at that -- as each slice takes over 10
minutes to copy from the NAS I really don't want to do them more than once.

Do I even need dar_xform or could I just concatenate the slices?

> If your NAS support ftp or sftp access, 

No, the unencrypted slices are never present on the NAS (which is not in
a secure location, and I like to be able to throw away old backup disks
without worrying about their contents).