Re: [WinMac] Re: Tar & archive formats

Daniel L. Schwartz(expresso[at]snip.net)
Wed, 22 Sep 1999 11:19:51 -0400

        Actually, I believe it's *extremely* important to keep this thread going,
because it is central to my recommendation to NOT deploy MacOS X Server.

        As long as there is NO viable - Read Mac-Friendly - backup solution, I
will *not* recommend MacOS X Server. And as long as MacOS X Server runs on
Apple hardware, with no PCI hardware RAID controllers, a rigorous backup
schedule must be followed because of the lack of fault-tolerant disk storage.

        In short, these are the reasons why I do *NOT* recommend MacOS X Server.
**IF** MacOS X Server would run on Alpha or x86/K7 hardware, then I would
consider running it in locations that have a full time Unix administrator.

        Cheers!
        Dan

At 10:42 AM 9/22/99 +0000, John Droggitis <johnd@cybernex.net> wrote:
>Leonard Rosenthol wrote:
>
>> Exactly what I said above. It's a FLAT FILE structure based
>> on pathnames rather than having actual "links" between a parent
>> directory and it's children. And yes, each of those entries has a
>> header with some basic information - but information that is
>> incomplete for Unix, let alone other platforms (Wintel, MacOS, etc.).
>
>Right. I'm not arguing with your flat file assertion. What I'm saying is
that
>the there's nothing inadequate with using a flat file, as long as it
contains all
>needed information. And the information that it contains is not incomplete:
><geek> all the fields of the unix stat structure, which is the _complete_
set of
>file statistics, except the device specific details, are included in the tar
>header </geek>.
>
>> Also, as I noted in my message, those pathnames are SHORT
>> (100 characters), ASCII-based, which makes storing/restoring
>> non-English filenames pretty much impossible. To use your
>> reference, see
>> <http://www.gnu.org/manual/tar/html_mono/tar.html#TOC112> and
>> <http://www.gnu.org/manual/tar/html_mono/tar.html#TOC109>).
>>
>> GNU tar may support absolute pathnames, but it's not part of
>> the POSIX spec for tar.
>>
>
>GNU tar supports both absolute pathnames and (very) long filenames and paths.
>POSIX specs don't consern me, it's the actual product you use that matters.
>
>> Let's also not forget about other well known limitations of
>> Tar such as EXTREMELY poor recovery of corrupted archives, lack of a
>> segmenting architecture, Unix-centricity, and of course no support
>> for integrated compression (NOTE: .tgz is NOT integrated compression
>> since it requires decompression of the entire archive before being
>> able to extract a single item!)
>
>Look, I'm not saying that tar is the best archiver/backup solution. All I'm
>trying to say is that tar is perfectly adequate. The original point that
I was
>refuting was "don't use unix as a fileserver because tar is no good", and
it was
>based on incorrect assertions about tar. Tar is very prevalent and
widestpread,
>has ports to every major platform and it supports features that stuffit and
>retrospect don't have, but I REALLY don't want to get into that. Even if you
>don't like tar, there are commercial solutions you can use for unix as
well, such
>as CTAR (which is based on tar :-) and solidstor.
>
>> As the original author of StuffIt Expander, and most of the
>> components of the StuffIt Engine (incl. the Tar support) I stand by
>> my categorization of Tar and it's (lack of) usefulness as a backup
>> and archiving solution.
>
>Nice to see your credentials. I've been a software developer and
administrator
>primarily on unix machines for 10 years now, and I can read the tar source
code
>and understand it - and I have. I think I've proven my point and since
this is
>getting way off topic, let's continue this privately, but I really don't
think
>there's much left to say.
>
>--John
>
>
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>

        Yours truly,
        Daniel L. Schwartz,
        Electrical Engineer.

        Dan's MacOS Consulting
        239 Great Road
        Maple Shade, NJ 08052-3044

        856-642-7666 <-- Note new area code (was 609)

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