Re: suggestion: do not keep files in tar archives.

Miek Gieben <[email protected]> writes:

| [On 16 Dec, @14:43, Jesper wrote in "Re: [hdup-user] suggestion: do ..."]
| > I want to keep the possibility of having daily incremental back ups, something I don't
| > get with just mirroring. Still I also want to have fast access (secs rather
| > than several hours) to the files of the backup.
| 
| from quickly looking at afio I see that there are some differences.
| 
| Usage:  [filename generator] | afio -o [options] archive  : write archive
| 
| So i have to do something fishy with 'filelist', but that can be abstracted
| in the hdupafiolib.c so that is not a big problem.
| 
| Afio can, just as tar, gzip the archive on the fly. Now, with tar it turned out
| that this has bugs, or didn't work over the network. Whatever the reason I have
| since done this myself in 'hdup'. By doing a 'tar xvf - | gzip', this can also
| be done with afio: cat filelist | afio -o - | gzip -c > archive.afio.gz
| 
| The restoring will be done in the same way, so first unzip, then extract.
| 
| My question is this: if you gzip afio archives in this way, will there still
| be a speed benefit compared to tar? You will need the entire archive before
| being able to unzip it....
Likely not, but IIRC afio is capable of gziping the files inside the
archive. This has the benefit that should part of the file be damaged, the
rest might still work.