The star utility is the fastest known implementation of tar. It has been tested at speeds exceeding 14 MB/s. (This is more than double the speed that dump gets.) star development started in 1982 and is still in progress. star ’s main advantages over other tar implementations are:
This is a “double-buffering” system that keeps the tape streaming. This gives you faster backups than you can achieve with dump, if the size of the filesystem is > 1 GB.
It has a user-tailorable interface for comparing tar archives against file trees.
You may archive pathnames up to 1024 bytes, as you can with dump.
More recent copies on disk
will not be clobbered from the backup volume. This may be the main
advantage over other tar implementations. This
allows automatic repair of a corrupted filesystem. (You can check for
differences after doing this with the diff
option.)
star automatically detects swapped archives and transparently reads them the right way.
star is available from ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix/star.
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