[Bug-tar] Untar on big archive fails

[Rolf Leggewie]

Hi,

I made a backup of one of my partitions.  The data was well over ten 
Gigabytes.  The backup was made from Knoppix 3.7 to a fat32 partition 
which necessitated splitting of the tar file.  The command I used was 
'tar -cv /mnt/hdc1/|split -b 722222222 - /mnt/hdd1/bigboy.tar.'  which 
resulted in 20 split files (summing up to 12GB).  Now I apparently 
cannot get tar to restore all files from the archive.

Both 'cat bigboy.tar.a? > bigboy.tar;tar -xf bigboy.tar' and 'cat 
bigboy.tar.a?|tar -x' only restore about eight of the 12 GB.  There are 
at least three directories not being restored.  'cat bigboy.tar.a?|tar 
-t|wc -l' tells me that there are 7883 files in the archive.  But 'tar 
-tf bigboy.tar|wc -l' only has 7540 files.  My suspicion is that the 
remaining 343 files might make up the missing 4 GB.  I compiled the 
newest version of tar from December 21st to extract the files but that 
did not help.  I do not remember ever seeing an error message either 
while tarring or untarring.

Please cc me on responses, I am not a member of the list.

Best regards

Rolf