question about backups

[James Gray]

On Monday 10 October 2005 07:52, Gregory Piñero wrote:
> These are all good ideas. I'm personally using the tar method, but I can't
> figure out a good way to test that my tar file will actually work when the
> time comes ...
>
> Is there any safe way to do that?

According to "man tar" the "-W" option will attempt to verify the integrity of 
an archive.

If you have compressed archives (tgz, tar.gz or tar.bz2) then you'll need to 
check them for compression errors too:

gzip -t or gzip --test will verify the ingrity of a gzipped file.
bzip2 uses the same switches as gzip for testing archives.

If you decided to use "zip" the magic chant is:
zip -T

I wont bother with rar or any other compression tools - I'll leave that as a 
task for you.  Hint: to get the info above, try "man <tool>" and search for 
the word "integrity".  How do you search a man page? you ask - simple, hit 
the forward slash "/" and enter your search string.  Hit "n" to go to the 
next occurance.

"man man" is your friend.

Cheers,

James
-- 
<dark> Turns out that grep returns error code 1 when there are no matches.
       I KNEW that.  Why did it take me half an hour?
 -- Seen on #Debian