Matt Lung wrote:

I have hard disk backups setup using amanda on Fedora Core 3.  Everything is
great except when I use amrecover.  Trying to restore an old file I will get tar
errors like this:

tar: ./dir/somefile: invalid sparse archive member
tar: Skipping to next header
tar: Archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers

Do I need to dump the vanilla tar (1.14.4), and compile from a special source
version for amanda to work with tar backups?

gnutar 1.14 is broken as you noticed.  But it's not too badly
broken: the archive it wrote is correct, only when restoring
the detection of a sparse archive member is buggy.
Downgrade to gnutar 1.13.25 (that's what I did when I encountered
the problem a few weeks ago) to restore.

Or, if you're brave, upgrade to gnutar 1.15.xxx which is supposed
to fix this bug.  And let us know if it works, or if there are other
bugs introduced.


--
Paul Bijnens, Xplanation                            Tel  +32 16 397.511
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http://www.xplanation.com/          email:  Paul.Bijnens AT xplanation DOT com
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