Phil Schaffner wrote:
If you can read the directory in place, you may be able to extract to the new target location (at least up to the 2GB limit if not beyond) without moving the archive.
(e.g. "tar jxvf archive_name.tar.bz -C /new/filesystem/location")
The only thing is, tar.bz2 archives are compressed after the tar archive is complete. This allows for redundancy between files to be used, but isn't good for backup purposes. You might be able to recover some of the archive, but it might be considerably less than 2GB. For backups, I suggest using uncompressed tar, or a utility such as dar, which compresses before archiving (zip does that, but can't handle large archives).
Yeah, I usually use gzip on tar archives, but I was trying to take free up as much space as possible to make way for fresh FC2 installs, so I went with bzip2. I have two backups like this, I haven't even tried the _really_ important archive -- I just don't want to know if I can't open that.
In any case, the moral is to test such backups before wiping your original home directory!
Lesson duly learned. I thought that an md5 checkum of the resulting file before an after any transfers to other filesystems would have been enough. It's my own dumb fault. I've learned that disk storage is never permanent and I thank the guy on this list who has in his signature file:
"/dev/null the ultimate in permanent storage."
eeegads, what a headache this one has been.
Thanks for your help,
Andrew
Jonathan
