Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!uw-june!uw-entropy!dataio!pilchuck!toad!jgray 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 UUCP:{ihnp4|caip|tektronix|ucbvax}!uw-beaver!tikal!pilchuck!jgray USNAIL: 10525 Willows Road N.E. /C-46 Redmond, Wa. 98052 (206) 881 - 6444 x470 Telex: 15-2167