tar big file??? reading problem

From: Robert Jakubowski (robertj_at_mechoshade.com)
Date: 03/22/04 

Date: Sun, 21 Mar 2004 23:16:40 -0800

I have a problem with restoring/listing a tar tape archive (tar [x|t]vf
/dev/rmt0) on AIX 4.3.3. Everything goes fine until it reaches one of
the archived files. At this point, it reads the tape for a while,
rewinds it, reads it, rewinds again... and so forth - it can't pass that
file. I am sure that there are other files - I have the backup log. I
have a couple of tapes with that contents from other days - the same
problem.
For now, my only guess is that the problem has something to do with the
file size. I know that tar should be fine with files up to 2G, but
apparently here that's the case. It is a 1G file, the biggest on the
archive among the files before it. Out of curosity, I backed up just
this file to another tape and tried to read it - the same thing happens:
it lists the file but after that it reads the tape and rewinds back and
forth, never stops...
Anyone have run across a similar problem? Any ideas? It is sort of
important to me ;)

Thanks,
Robert J.

Relevant Pages

  • RE: redhat-list Digest, Vol 27, Issue 26
    ... The reason I was tarring a tar file to the tape I didn't want to backup a whole file system just to test the tape drive. ... I take that same tape and try to read it on the tape drive that is connected to the linux machine and it doesn't work. ... echo command as in windows ...
    (RedHat)
  • Re: problem with restore
    ... can tar be used to backup files on a machine with remote tape drive..?? ... the '-' on the tar command makes the 'f' go to stdout. ... Have you tried taking backup using tar utility instead of rdump. ... If you take backup and try restore using tar, ...
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  • Backup Options - Recommendations?
    ... We need a good backup solution that is "production" quality for our AIX ... tape labeling would be nice. ... I have tried tar, cpio, and storix. ...
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  • Re: Copying tar archives/tarballs to tape
    ... You may want to play about with the block size arguments in tar to find ... Some tape drives, when written to in ... Some apply error correction only on a per-block basis, ... for bzip2) flag when writing to tape, but bear in mind that compression uses CPU ...
    (uk.comp.os.linux)
  • RE: problem with restore
    ... Have you tried taking backup using tar utility instead of rdump. ... If you take backup and try restore using tar, ... Also you can verify the content of tape after backup using ...
    (RedHat)