News Group Posts

using tar basics restoring tar tape

From: Tony Lawrence <tony@aplawrence.com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: tape mount and file system type?
Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2000 08:54:16 -0400

teverett wrote:
> 
> hey all,
>                 can anyone tell me how to mount a dat tape with a unix
> media and recover a tar file from it?  im currently using Redhat 6.1.
> ive tried every option in the "man mount" files,  but when i try to
> mount the tape the return always tells me to specify the filesystem
> type.  does anyone have any experience in this?  thanks in advance for
> any help!!!   :)

You don't mount a tar tape.

To succesfully restore a file, you first want to know how
the archive was created: relative or absolute.  To do this,
run

tar tvf /dev/whateveryourtapenodeis | head

You'll get back either:

file1
file2
..

or

./file1
./file2
..

or

/file1
/file2
..

or even

//file1
//file2
..


The first two are relative forms, and if you restored either
the entire archive 

tar xvf /dev/nameofyourtapenode

or a particular file

tar xvf /dev/nameofyourtapenode file2

The files would end up in your current directory, which may
not be whereyou want them.

With some tars you have to be specific, and need to match
exactly how it was stored:
tar xvf /dev/nameofyourtapenode ./file2 

Conversely, if the archive was created with absolute paths,
a restore of

tar xvf /dev/nameofyourtapenode 

will put everything back where it originally was, which
again may not be what you want: there is a flag 

tar xAvf /dev/nameofyourtapenode 

that will suppress the leading "/"'s and let you restore
relative to your current directory.


And again, some tars require explicit naming: if it was
saved as //home/james/file , you need to say

tar xvf /dev/nameofyourtapenode //home/james/file

and if it was saved as /home/james/file , you need to say

tar xvf /dev/nameofyourtapenode /home/james/file


-- 
Tony Lawrence (tony@aplawrence.com)
Linux articles, help, book reviews, tests, 
job listings and more : /Linux

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