7 comment

1. Hi,

   I am running the same command to extract a directory from the tape backup. But its taking lot of time. So I have cancelled it

   Could you tell me will it take time or else there is any other command which execute faster.

   Thanks
   Raju

2. Raju,
   tar will take time, even when extracting a single file it will take a long time to complete if the tarball is big.
   I know of nothing faster than tar to extract from a tar. Maybe just background the process and wait.
   Cheers

3. Under windows, total commander or similar could do it faster ;)

   1. No, there is no index in a tar archive, it is serial data. It doesn’t matter what operating system or what app you use, a tarball has to be read entirely before you know its contents.

4. Recovering from a tape is slower than disk. Be patient. Especially if you are retrieving a single file as mrpraline has explained it is a serial data file. If the file is at the end you will wait til the end before you even see the extraction. If the file is at the beginning, it will show its extracted and then you will wait a while before the command completes. If you want to reduce the time period of recoveries, say you are going to restore files more often, break them up into separate files. For example a tarball for /home and a tarball for /usr and /etc and / and /boot in another. That’s how I tar things up. One for the system and one for the actual user data. System is usually on my systems than data files.

5. You dont have to wait. Just output the file to stdout using the –to-stdout or -0 and you will see the file the instant tar gets to it on tape.

6. im getting this error: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors

   kindly help

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