On 2014-03-30 14:30, James Knott wrote:
This is getting all too complex. Mebe we should go back to 9 track tapes and use tar the way it was intended. ;-)
Wait till you get a scratch on that tape. If you used compressed tar, the entire tape is useless.
I just back up to a hard drive with cp -a, which works fine. The attributes are preserved and I can easily mount the drive to access all the files.
And then you can get a transmission error, and one file gets a corrupted byte. On some type of files, like a jpeg photo, it is almost destroyed. Have a look at this link, there is an example of what happens when a single bit (bit, not even byte) changes in a jpeg. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/bitrot-and-atomic-cows... For doing backups, you have to compare source with copy after done. At least, a checksum compare. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 13.1 x86_64 "Bottle" at Telcontar)