Re: Testing Tar (was Re: bad news for bsdtar..)

From: Richard Coleman <richardcoleman_at_mindspring.com>
Date: Sat, 24 Apr 2004 12:06:43 -0400
Don Lewis wrote:
>>>At least the -current version of tar skips reading the
>>>data when it is writing to /dev/null.
>>
>>A-ha!  That explains a few of the odd timings I've seen.
>>I wonder why it does that?  (Other than to look good on
>>benchmarks, of course. ;-)
> 
> 
> This speeds up Amanda quite a bit.  Amanda will run tar with the
> --totals option as well as other options to specify either full or
> incremental backups multiple times for each file system that it backs
> up.  It does this to plan the best mixture of full and incremental
> backups.  If tar actually read the data from disk each time, the
> planning phase would take a *lot* longer, and would thrash the disk a
> lot more.

Until libarchive gets support for sparse files, it's probably better to 
stick with gtar or rdump with Amanda.

But the concept of a version of Amanda that natively uses libarchive is 
very cool.  It seems like a natural target.

Richard Coleman
richardcoleman_at_mindspring.com
Received on Sat Apr 24 2004 - 07:06:31 UTC

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