In article <1993Jan11.072222.7301@bronte.boeing.com> paula@bronte.boeing.com (Paul Allen) writes:
quoted text
>Tar does support multi-volume backups.  Multi-volume archives are not
>compatible with compression because tar pipes it's output through
>compress and can't tell where the volume boundaries are.  I'm not 
>sure I want to compress my backups, because a single glitch renders 
>the whole thing unusable.

It seems to me the best way to go would be to compress each file
before it's put in the tar file, and then (obviously) decompress it
for restores.  That way, the backup takes up much less space, but a
glitch or even a missing disk won't corrupt the backup.  I realize
that the compression ratio will not be as high as it would if the
whole file-system were compressed, but it will certainly be better
than no compression at all!

I suppose this could be accomplished by piping find into compress into
tar, but I'm not entirely sure.

-Joel