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From: jgray@toad.pilchuck.Data-IO.COM (Jerry Late Nite Gray)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: ARC/ZOO/TAR
Message-ID: <765@pilchuck.Data-IO.COM>
Date: Tue, 1-Dec-87 15:52:12 EST
Article-I.D.: pilchuck.765
Posted: Tue Dec  1 15:52:12 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 4-Dec-87 23:13:07 EST
References: <3027@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu>
Sender: news@pilchuck.Data-IO.COM
Distribution: na
Lines: 49
Summary: tarring to more than one object

In article <3027@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu>, amit@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu (Neta Amit) writes:
> ARC (and derivatives) has been around for quite some time, and has developed
>     into the MS-DOS de-facto standard for archiving and info-exchange.
> 
> To me, the main advantage of ZOO is its ability to store structure,
>     as well as contents. There are two disadvantages: (1) it is not widely
>     accepted, and (2) it needs an external source to create the structure
> ....

> This weekend, a public domain TAR (courtesy John Gilmore) has been posted
> on comp.sources.unix, and is now implemented under Unix and MS-DOS. It
> is likely to be ported to VMS, MAC, Amiga.
> 
> PDTAR offers a number of significant advantages over both ZOO and ARC:
>  - It is the de-facto standard in the Unix world. Info-exchange with
>    Unix machines is much easier with TAR.
>  - It creates the structure it needs
>  - It is fast; on the small sample that I did -- faster than ARC or ZOO
>  - It can compress, and the resulting archive is small; on the sample above, 
>    smaller than the .arc or .zoo files
> 
Yes I can see TAR and ZOO being more widely used since they deal with
file structures, But I see one possible problem with respect to doing something
like making backups. When you are creating an archive of a single directory
it is easy to see whether the amount of information you are archiving will
fit on the target media (floppy or tape). When arhiving a whole structure
it is much more difficult. Do TAR and/or ZOO allow you to archive a whole
directory structure onto more than one disk in much the same way that
DOS's BACKUP command (or the FASTBACK utility) does?

Presently I use FASTBACK for backups and PKARC for carting around small
collections of files. I have occasionally used FASTBACK to transfer file
structures from one machine to another. This is very nice but it has a
few limitations. Since FASTBACK uses it's own formating method, the archived
files aren't readable by anything else and can't be shipped around the net.


Just some thoughts.

---------------
					Jerrold L. Gray

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