Long live tar! *T*ape *AR*chiving may be dead, but the command it had wrought shows no sign of aging. It's part of an on demand backup approach for our web site. A script kicks it off where it tars and bz2 compresses the entire document root to a 17GB file and then FTPs it to a test server where it gets extracted to the corresponding document root. I daresay that I don't ever recall running into a problem with the use of tar, including hitting a memory or file size limit (of course, omitting file system size limits which have nothing to do with a limitation of tar). John Lolis Coordinator of Computer Systems 100 Martine Avenue White Plains, NY 10601 tel: 1.914.422.1497 fax: 1.914.422.1452 https://whiteplainslibrary.org/ *“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.”* — Richard Feynman <https://click.fourhourmail.com/5qure95xkf7hvvo93wh2/7qh7h8h05vr4zrtz/aHR0cHM6Ly9lbi53aWtpcGVkaWEub3JnL3dpa2kvUmljaGFyZF9GZXlubWFu>, theoretical physicist and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 On Thu, 21 Sept 2023 at 14:35, Esmé Cowles <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > That seems like a reasonable approach to me. Aren't .docx files > directories of XML files in a Zip container? If so, they probably wouldn't > compress much anyway. > > I recently had to download large sets of files from two different > services, and one of them used Zip and the other used uncompressed Tar. The > Zip packaging was awful because it needed to be split into a lot of files > to avoid having one file to too large (they were all around 2GB). But the > Tar worked much more smoothly, since it could just let me download a single > 50GB Tar file that worked fine. > > -Esmé > > > On Sep 21, 2023, at 2:29 PM, Amy Schuler < > [log in to unmask]> wrote: > > > > Hi all, > > does anyone use the tar command to group files anymore? I'm looking to > > group some .docx files together to archive in a system that does not use > > folder hierarchies. I'm thinking of doing this without compression. > > Thoughts/comments, or good alternatives? > > Thanks! > > Amy > > > > -- > > > > Amy C. Schuler (she/her) > > Director, Information Services & Library > > > > Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies | 2801 Sharon Turnpike | Millbrook, > NY > > www.caryinstitute.org >