Re: Corrupcion in Tar Archive with use LTO tape

[alvarg]

LTO 4 is all that I could get here and I can't go to something bigger, I understand the problems of tar and I also know that what I imagine small is big, in my opinion I don't think anyone wants to do it. If I have to spend tons then I spend it. The money will not come from you do not worry. All the tools that I mention I am considering but they all use essentially tar for tapes. The truth is, I don't look for people with negative ideas, I look for people with positive ideas. If you think that tar is not for that, then I accept and tolerate your comment but it is wrong in my opinion, as it is not going to be for tape backups something called tape archive (tar). If no one here wants to make it perfect, what is the problem? This is free and open source software, this is voluntary! If it is made perfect if it is not made also perfect. The truth is that people like this are the ones who disinceive the improvements in the software. But hey, I'm already looking for freelancers to do it and if I'm going to pay a fortune, it's my money, not yours. So don't worry. And another thing, are you going to forbid me to comment? If I want to comment, it is my thread, if you do not want to receive what I say, easily, do not answer and that's it. I love what you told me but understand I am not in this world to surrender to the adversity, if not to make this world a better place, if you are not interested in tar, perfect for me if and as they say the ideas must be said not to keep them for oneself.

El vie, 25 dic 2020 a las 20:42, MIke Pepe (<lamune@doki-doki.net>) escribió:

Hey there, I do have some advice for you, which is free- like tar- so take it for what it’s worth.

 

Tar is an ancient utility and is not the only way to perform backup/restore. There’s dump, cpio, probably many others on the free side as well as commercial products like Backup Exec and Netvault which are capable of automatically restarting failed backups. Tar is fine but there are many tools in the toolbox besides tar, some of which may already be far more resilient.

 

I personally would not waste my time/money in improving tar to deal with the scenario you are experiencing. I doubt anyone cares to try and make tar resilient to a situation that is totally unpredictable like sudden power loss. There’s too many variables at play and quite frankly nobody in the “real world” in a commercial setting uses tar to do critical backup and restore work.

 

Overall, in my opinion, tar is a pretty terrible backup/restore solution except in the simplest scenarios. I don’t know if you’re just tinkering with your own personal stuff or if this is for a company, but if it’s corporate in nature tar is definitely the wrong tool for the modern workplace.

 

I would also add that what seems “simple” to you may be incredibly complex. It’s only simple to you because you don’t know how to do it. The devil is in the details.

 

I think you should not waste your time. What you should control is the variables you can control rather than asking others to make changes for you. I work in a large development setting and often you have to find solutions with what you have at your disposal because getting the dev teams to actually “fix” the problem takes far too long.

 

1: consider not using tar.

2: break up your backups into smaller pieces instead of one large job. That way if there is a power failure you can re-start at a checkpoint instead of re-doing the entire thing. And log everything you do so you know what got done and what didn’t

3: a UPS is not intended to run for hours and hours. It’s intended to give you time to gracefully shut down your system to prevent corruption and failure. If you live in a place that experiences frequent and long-term power outages,  invest in a generator to ride out long-term power failures.

4: LTO-4 is over a decade old. Newer tape technology is much faster and would reduce the exposure to power failures by completing backups in less time.

 

Given what I’ve seen in the FOSS world, expect that nobody will ever fix tar for you unless you have tons of money to throw at some dev to “fix” it.

 

I think you’ve more than made your point. If the devs think your bug is worth fixing, they will do so. No need to keep repeating yourself.

 

Good luck

-Mike

 

From: help-tar <help-tar-bounces+lamune=doki-doki.net@gnu.org> On Behalf Of alvarg
Sent: Friday, December 25, 2020 2:28 PM
To: help-tar@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Corrupcion in Tar Archive with use LTO tape

 

I want to add something else that may be useful, if you search the internet it is full of threads of people who despair when tar gets corrupted and nobody knows exactly what to tell them to do when it happens, I have even heard as a solution to this, download the file again Therefore, it would be something very positive to repair, but after the good advice they gave me, I will look for someone who, paying him, will make the code of the program, obviously I will put the condition to be released under the GPL, but I will also look there to see if someone is willing to do it. do not complain you also have to get to work

 

El vie, 25 dic 2020 a las 9:36, alvarg (<gameboylandia@gmail.com>) escribió:

Thanks again to everyone.  I was lucky enough to see Mr. Richard Stallman, founder of the FSF, twice in my life, he said something that I always remember that free software is a matter of freedom, no price.  that free software should help people and improve the daily work they do.  that if you were a developer and you see a flaw in free software you should try to fix it and with that improvement help thousands of people around the world, that if you don't know how to develop but see something that seems like a flaw or bug, you should report it and do  have the developers fix that and help with that.  In this case, I only follow the excellent advice of Richard stallman, one of the people I most admire and who, thanks to him, entered the world of free and open source software.  thank you all and hopefully soon read that this improvement has come to gnu tar and what happens to me currently is just a bad memory

 

El vie., 25 dic. 2020 4:46, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> escribió:

On 12/24/20 10:15 AM, alvarg wrote:
> It is as simple as a
> software that can repair a corrupted tar due to a power outage the
> unexpected EOF in tar. Is it too much to ask?

It sounds like a good feature to have, but not a trivial one to
implement in general. Perhaps someone who's reading this list will be
able to implement it (at least for the failure modes you're interested
in), or perhaps fund someone else who can implement it.