Re: [gentoo-user] STAR options have me confused

[Joerg.Schilling@fokus.fraunhofer.de (Joerg Schilling)]

Mick <michaelkintzios@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> I do not seem to be able to run star with the correct options despite some 
> experimenting ... and was hoping you could correct my errors.

Try the command lines from the example section in the man page ;-)

> The fs is shown to be 1.1G large:
> ========================================================
> # df -h
> Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> ...
> /dev/hda5             5.8G  1.1G  4.5G  20% /media/hda5
> ========================================================
>
> I want to save the backup on a USB drive on /media/sda1.  Therefore I ran star 
> as root like this:
>
> # cd /dev/sda1
> # star -xattr -H=exustar -c -f hda5_root1.star /media/hda5 -C /media/sda1

This is a useless command line as -C /media/sda1 is executed after archiving
/media/hda5.

> After a lot of messages like these:
> ========================================================
> star: No such file or directory. Cannot listxattr 
> for '/media/hda5/usr/sbin/dumpfilter'.
> star: No such file or directory. Cannot listxattr 
> for '/media/hda5/usr/sbin/ethtool'.
> star: No such file or directory. Cannot listxattr 
> for '/media/hda5/usr/sbin/traceroute6'.
> star: No such file or directory. Cannot listxattr for '/media/hda5/usr/tmp'.
> star: No such file or directory. Cannot listxattr 
> for '/media/hda5/usr/share/firstboot/modules/rootpassword.py'.
> ========================================================

There seems to be a problem with xattr support on your system.
Unfortunately, Linux allows you not to install a sufficiently complete OS
basesystem.

Make sure that not only star supports xattrs.

> ... it eventually completes.  What puzzles me is the size of the star archive, 
> which compared to a vanilla tar archive is massive:
> ========================================================
> # ls -la /media/sda1
> total 17294256
> drwxr-xr-x  2 knoppix knoppix        4096 Feb  1 13:01 .
> drwxr-xr-x 14 root    root              0 Feb  1 11:45 ..
> -rw-r--r--  1 root    root      932474880 Dec  6 13:50 hda5_root.star
> -rw-r--r--  1 root    root      867123200 Dec  6 13:26 hda5_root.tar
> -rw-r--r--  1 root    root    14486097920 Feb  1 13:13 hda5_root1.star
> -rw-r--r--  1 root    root      940288000 Feb  1 10:42 hda5_root1.tar
> ...
> ========================================================
>
> Is this difference in size between the hda5_root1.tar and hda5_root1.star 
> expected?  I also show above the previous back up I did as a comparison 
> (although I cannot recall exactly what options I chose to run star with).

As I don't know what's in both files, I cannot comment.

If you create a tar archive with POSIX.1-2001 extensions, you get at least 
1kB of additional meta-data per archived file.

GNU tar does not support Linux specific extensions...

Jörg

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