Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cmcl2!phri!marob!samperi
From: samperi@marob.masa.com (Dominick Samperi)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Re: Tar Problem -- HELP !!!
Message-ID: <1989Jun24.011911.27545@marob.masa.com>
Date: 24 Jun 89 01:19:11 GMT
References: <20060@adm.BRL.MIL> <926@sering.cwi.nl>
Reply-To: samperi@marob.masa.com (Dominick Samperi)
Organization: ESCC,  New York City
Lines: 18

In article <926@sering.cwi.nl> fmr@cwi.nl (Frank Rahmani) writes:
>I include the original posting as I received it. The description on the
>manpage is clear. Should compile under any flavor of UNIX(tm). It is
>in daily use at our site and has rescued many otherwise unreadable files.
							            ^^^^^

I don't think this really solves the original problem, which results from
a rather unreliable tape backup standard (QIC-24). Sure, the posted utility
can be used to recover files from a damaged tar archive, but this problem occurs
at the user buffer level, and the problem is that these cartridge devices
will not skip over a small segment that was written in error in order to
find data that was in the first segment originally. After overwriting
a large tape segment, the only low-level command that one can use is
"find next file mark", and this is not very helpful.
-- 
Dominick Samperi -- ESCC
samperi@marob.masa.com
uunet!hombre!samperi