Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-factory (506 mails)

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Re: [opensuse-factory] christmas screen
  • From: "Carlos E. R." <robin.listas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 7 Dec 2006 14:50:52 +0100 (CET)
  • Message-id: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0612071425110.1727@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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The Wednesday 2006-12-06 at 21:12 -0800, Randall R Schulz wrote:

> > > But the tradeoff with per-file compression is that you typically
> > > get rather poor compression for archives that contain many small
> > > files.
> >
> > Yes, the compression ratio is a bit worse, but that's something I
> > will happily sacrifice for safety where backups are concerned.
>
> But what is this "safety" we're talking about? Usually if a file is
> corrupted, it's massively corrupted and if it's intact, then it's
> intact.
>
> It's a specious safety you get with the CPIO approach. Either you
> back-ups are intact or they're not.

No, that's not the point.

A single error in a tar.gz archive renders the whole archive useless, with
all its contents - because it is the tar archive that is compressed.

On the other hand, if the files are first compressed and then archived
with cpio, a single media error will only inutilize the single file
affected, not the whole.

That's way safer, IMO. And not only IMO.

> > I have some backups of an entire HD done using nearly a hundred
> > floppies - you can imagine when - and the whole backup is still
> > fully retrievable, although some floppies have errors.
>
> Yes. Thank god we're now far beyond the floppy era. There is nothing
> that can meaningfully be done with a diskette as far as archiving or
> back-ups are concerned.

You seem to not read the complete paragraph and then jump to
the wrong conclusions too fast. I mentioned disquetes only because that
application was able to make reliable backups with unreliable media, and
thus I would like to have a modern app in linux able to do the same thing
with modern media - not disquetes.

- --
Cheers,
Carlos E. R.
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