I used amrestore to recover a file and received error message which
look like this:

Extracting from file /backup/20050125170301/condor._.5
tar: ./var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin: invalid sparse archive member
tar: Skipping to next header
tar: Archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers
tar: ./var/cache/apt-proxy/.apt-proxy/backends/debian/packages.db: invalid 
sparse archive member
tar: Skipping to next header

I'm using GNU tar 1.14.

I am using Amanda-2.4.5b1, with CVS as of about Thu Nov 18 16:50:15
PST 2004, with a small change unrelated to tar.

I should be using the same version of tar to create the backup as I
did to restore, though I updated (in the Debian sense) many packages
recently.  Why is the tar file being created taking advantage of
sparse files, if it is being extracted without sparse files?

-- 
Kevin Dalley
kevin AT kelphead DOT org