I have discovered that some of my tar archives do not have permission info for directories, only for files; whereas some other tar archives have the info complete. One of the incomplete tars was made by Yast backup of suse 7.1 or 7.3
For example, when I extract a tree, I get:
.../home/ root:root .../home/cer/ root:root (instead of cer:users) .../home/cer/file cer:users .../home/bin/ root:root (instead of cer:users) .../home/bin/script cer:users
So, if the original tar did not save the permission information at that time (years ago) there is nothing I can do now to recover them.
But I don't understand why some tar archives I did have it and some don't.
As you said it was some years ago and may have the options used at that time. I have been using tar/dump for many years always used tar cvf <some file or tape drive> <file list> and never had a problem, as far as I can remember with perms/owners not being saved. Some options will muck them up when saving with tar. Ken