Hi all: For backup purposes, I need to save big dirs of data to tape. The easy way: a gzipped tarball (eg: tar zcvf ..). Another method: tar .. ; bzip2 ...-> you get a tar.bz2 which has better compression ratio. Now let's suppose I need to recover data from backup and the tape has some problems at any point. If I had saved separate files (not tarball) it's easy to recover most of the backup (only files on the broken point would be damaged and possibly couldn't be restored). But what does it happen when you have only a one big file (tarball, eg)????? Would you lose more data than the strictly affected by the tape failure? Would you lose all the data? Have you got any comparative showing which methods are the more robust ones, etc? I read that .bz2 is more "secure" (=robust) than .gz (maybe in tape howto). Any ideas / advices are welcome. TIA. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= ** RoMaN SoFt / LLFB ** roman@madrid.com http://pagina.de/romansoft ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~