Backup Strategy Not Working

[Petter Adsen]

On Fri, 31 Jul 2015 19:37:53 +0100
Graham Watkins <shellycat.gw at ntlworld.com> wrote:

> Hello All,
> 
> I have been running an automatic backup of my home partition using a tar 
> command which runs as a scheduled task once a week.
> 
> The command is as follows:
> 
> tar -cvpzf /media/graham/Expansion\ Drive/graham.tar.gz /home/graham 
> --exclude "/home/graham/VirtualBox VMs"
> 
> Anyway recently I had reason to access the tar.gz file created by this 
> command and using Archive Manager, I attempted to open the tar.gz file.
> It would not open and I received the following error message:
> 
> gzip: stdin: invalid compressed data--format violated
> tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
> tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
> 
> I have found that If I run the command from a terminal. the file can be 
> accessed without problems.
> 
> To sum up, it seems that I do not have the backup strategy I thought I 
> had and this is somewhat disturbing.
> 
> Does anyone out there have a clue as to what the problem might be and 
> how it can be fixed?

As Ralf suggested, a bug in the GUI program you are using sounds
likely. Try another GUI archive manager.

> Failing that, can anyone suggest an alternative backup method that 
> avoids this problem?

Others have suggested Amanda, which I know has a very good reputation.
BackupPC is also supposed to be good. If you want something simpler,
you might want to take a look at rsync - it's what I use. There is also
a GUI for rsync, called backintime, that can deal with all the details
of scheduling, logging etc so you don't need to write your own scripts.
I've used it a lot in the past, and still have a couple of regular jobs
set up with it.

Petter

-- 
"I'm ionized"
"Are you sure?"
"I'm positive."
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