Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: Tar as filesystem

[Brian May]

>>>>> "John" == John Goerzen <address@hidden> writes:

    John> On 2003-12-29, Aaron Bentley
    John> <address@hidden> wrote:
    >> Perhaps these observations can be helpful the next time
    >> tar-as-filesystem comes up:

    John> Not really novel here.  You may, however, find zip to be a
    John> much more useful "filesystem".  It is designed to random
    John> access.  Tools already exist to do true
    John> adding/updating/deleting.  And you get some compression for
    John> free.

    John> Zip's traditional downsides are that it does not handle
    John> Unixy metadata terribly well, but that is not of great
    John> importance here, since only plain files and directories are
    John> being stored, and it is fine with those.

There are also alternatives to tar, eg. dar; from the man page:

       "At the difference of the tar command, dar is not suited to
       directly  use  tapes. So keep using tar for tape archives.
       Because, even using tar to write a slice on  a  tape,  you
       will  loose  all  the  interest  of another feature of dar
       which is its ability to directly access the data of  saved
       file  even  when compression is used. This way and in con­
       trast to the tar command, dar is able to extract  a  given
       file  much  faster from a backup and to also recover files
       that follow a data corruption (loosing just  the  file  in
       which data corruption occurred)."

I don't know if dar is suitable for this project for this purpose or
not, but it does strike me that it would appear to overcome at least
some of the limitations that were encountered in tar (I am not sure of
file deletion).

The web page is <URL:http://dar.linux.free.fr/>.
-- 
Brian May <address@hidden>