Backup Strategy Not Working

[Johnny Rosenberg]

2015-07-31 20:37 GMT+02:00 Graham Watkins <shellycat.gw at ntlworld.com>:
> 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"

Just curious: Why do you compress and why not just copying everything
to a folder? Nothing to uncompress and should be faster too. Most
files are already compressed anyway, so there isn't much space to gain
in many cases either.


Regards

Johnny Rosenberg
ジョニー・ローゼンバーグ

>
> 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?
>
> Failing that, can anyone suggest an alternative backup method that avoids
> this problem?
>
> Any advice would be appreciated.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Graham
>
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