4 ms·
Garbage data is not a problem since the length is known.
by the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
Garbage data is not a problem since the length is known.
- LukeShu 10y agoI do not understand the xz format enough to evaluate that claim myself, but TFA explicitly claims that garbage data is a problem.
- marcosdumay 10y agoHum, no. When you tar a set of files directly into a tape, you don't know the resulting tar size beforehand. Even less if you compress the result.
- mnarayan01 10y agoI would think you could just write the size at the end of the tape?
- ikawe 10y agoWhen you're reading the data later, how would you know where to find "the end" if you don't already know the length?
- mnarayan01 10y agoYou don't know the end of the data, but presumably(?) you know the end of the tape.
- marcosdumay 10y agoWe are talking past each other here... Making a backup with tar is done by typing something like that on bash: > tar -c - dir1 dir2 dir3 > /dev/tape That will (hopefully, I doubt I got the tar switches right) backup those dirs into the tape (that will actually have a weird name, not '/dev/tape'). Now, in practice Linux doesn't always know the size of a tape you inserted. But this is not the issue, if you accept the seeks needed for that, you'd better write at the beginning anyway.