[CentOS] schily tools

Les Mikesell
Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:44:58 -0000

On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 12:04 PM, Alan McKay <alan.mckay at gmail.com>
wrote:
> Hey folks,
>
> I'm reading up on gtar for tape archiving and it sounds kind of nasty
and
> not something I really want to rely on.
>
> It looks like star from the schily tools is preferred. ?I'm using
Centos
> (and RHEL) 5.7 which seems to have star but not sdd.

I don't think there is any such general consensus.  Are you reading
something that favors Solaris/*bsd over GNU based systems?

> Which leads me to believe that the Schily tools are maybe a bit
"rogue"

I doubt if they are as well maintained in linux distros as the GNU
tool set, particularly in terms of having recent fixes backported into
the versions carried in enterprise distros.

> My basic requirement with what I'm doing is to use standard tools and
> formats so that archives I write today can be readable in 10 years.

I've never had any doubts that current GNU tar would extract archives
made with it 10+ years ago - in fact I'm fairly sure I've done that.
Or that I'd be able to obtain a copy of it in the future.

> Is the use of Schily tools going to be contrary to my basic requirement?
> Is that considered a risk for future readability?

It shouldn't matter if you don't use either of the version's
extensions, and for archiving you probably don't need them.  For
example, star and GNUtar use very different concepts for incremental
backups - star is sort of like dump and must work on filesystem
boundaries where GNUtar's --listed incremental needs a file to hold
state but will work on arbitrary directories and can span mount
points.  But for archiving, you probably only care about the maximum
size of a file it can handle.

--
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com