I recently re-evaluated my backup strategy. After using tar for years I did some side by side comparisons between cpio and tar with regard to recovering damaged archives. I found that cpio was more reliable in this regard. In fact even though tar is quite familiar to me I find the cpio command line more intuitive. For these reasons i would like to switch to cpio to archive my data to magnetic tape (LTO). With the exception of single disk image file on my server none of the other files even come close to the 8 GB limit of the ustar format. I am just wondering if anyone is currently working on a path to allow for backup and restore of files larger than 8 GB?
BTW thank you to everyone that is involved with creating or maintaining this piece of software.