[kwlug-disc] So why not tar -cf tarball.tar a.xz b.xz c.xz, instead of tar -cJf tarball.tar.xz a b c ?

[Chris Frey]

On Fri, Oct 21, 2016 at 10:06:34AM -0400, B.S. wrote:
> So why is tar'ring gzip's instead of gzip'ping tarballs not more popular?

If we're just aiming for better recoverability here, what about something
like this:

	tar -cf - /bin | split --bytes=1M - archive.tar.
	bzip2 archive.tar.*

Note quite as granular as compressing individual files, but if one of
the split files was corrupt, better than nothing, and the tools exist
to do it this way already.

In my tests, a 1M split size seemed too big for tar to recover from
by itself, but fixtar was able to do it:

	https://github.com/BestSolution-at/fixtar

This is just brainstorming for the fun of it... not practical until
split can run bzip2 on the stream instead of individual files, I guess.

- Chris