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Re: Tar problem



On Sun, 1 Nov 1998, Ben Nes Michael wrote:

> Hi
> 
> I done tar -czv / > /xxx/xxx.gz.tar
> It worked then it stoped by saying:
> 
> tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
> 
> any one know what happend and what shell i do ?

I don't believe that you did that ;) Did you do it as root ? Did the
machine crash ? Got disk full ?

You tried to compress all the device files, among other things, and the
output file too into itself. At least one device file will fill anything
forever (/dev/zero) many other will block or give a ENODEV, and the raw
device of the fs where the output file is mounted is guaranteed to fill
itself with a large piece of itself ;). tar is not normally used to
compress device files, use cpio instead. 

Is there a backup howto ? (sheepishly) 

Peter