CompuServe Messages

'tar' is a very common, very popular archive format from the Unix world. But I have very good 'tar's for the PC and the Amiga, and a reasonable one for the Mac. The PC and Amiga versions have an interface to tape drives, so I use it with my Exabyte. I can easily backup either system quickly using 'tar', and even share the tapes between machines. (I wish I had a 'tar' tape interface for the Mac, that would make my day.) As I said, 'tar' is dirt-simple, it concats files with a little extra glue for block padding (like Xmodem does) to help with fixed-block devices and I/O streams, and extra file attribute info, and markers for new sub-directories, etc. You can easily 'tar' a directory tree into a single file. Most commonly on Unix, you'd then 'compress' that 'tar' file. Like most Unix tools, they separated the function: as compared to PC tools like PKZip and LHarc, which combined the archiving and compression. I would have thought that 'tar' was a useful way to send a CD-ROM mastering house a disk image. How else would it be done? I could imagine they might want a complete mirror backup of the hard disk in question, but there's still the question of which software to use to make that mirror. What piece of software do people use to make these master tapes? I'd think that it wouldn't be something complicated, after all, the mastering house has the machine to convert it all to ISO. I even used 'tar' to "back up" a CD-ROM, as an experiment. With gigabyte tape drives becoming commonplace, this isn't far-fetched. The tape isn't exactly random access, but with 'tar' and a fast tape drive (like this Exabyte 8500) I can still fetch files from it in a matter of minutes.