alternative to `tar`

[Jorge Fábregas]

On Friday 04 January 2008 11:54:03 am Guillaume wrote:
> Is there a way to speed up the restore process with any options to tar, or,
> any other command utility to use for my backup.

I don't think there's any easy solution for this besides creating smaller tar 
files. You can try this shell-script which is the one I use to create 
individual 8GB tar files (in order to burn them on dual-layer media):

http://www.informatik-vollmer.de/software/split-tar.php

It's called "split-tar". Before using this tool I created a big 80GB tar file 
and then I used the split command to split it in 8GB chunks...the problem 
with that was that when I needed to restore something from my DVD's I had to 
restored all 10 DVD's to a directory and then perform cat xa* > bigFile.tar

Split-tar came to the rescue...as it can create individual tar files with the 
approximate size I specify....

Anyway..you didn't specify your backup medium.  If it's another drive...why 
not just copy the files (without archiving them)?  This is what I do (night 
backups to my 2nd drive via a shell script). You can use rsync and many other 
tools...   When I backup to optical media that's then I use tar...(because I 
want to preserver ownership/permission bits...).

HTH,
Jorge