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Thread: tar Takes forever

  1. #1
    Join Date
    Apr 2006
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    Kansas City
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    213
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    Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal

    tar Takes forever

    Dear forum,

    What I wanted to do is backup my home directory and install 10.04 (I had 9.04) and then restore the home directory. My home dir was about 150 GBytes. I ran the command below
    Code:
    tar --use-compress-program=lzop -cf homeDir.tar.lzop /home/user
    I then ran
    Code:
    lzop -t homeDir.tar.lzop
    to test it and it tested out fine. It compressed it down to about 110 GBytes. I copied the file off the machine and installed 10.04.

    On the new system I copied the file on and first decompressed it using this command
    Code:
    lzop -x homeDir.tar.lzop
    and it gave me the file homeDir.tar.

    I'm now trying to untar the file but everything seems to hang. Right now I'm executing
    Code:
    time tar --extract homeDir.tar
    and it's just sitting there. I copied the tar file off onto another system and it's doing the same thing. I've let this thing run now for about 3 hours with no change.

    I know archive the files might add some overhead but it only took me an hour to archive and compress it to begin with. Add to that I transfered the uncompressed in an hour. At this rate it would have made more sense to scp the files over directly. Why would it take this long to unarchive this file?

    Any thoughts appreciated.
    Ubuntu Lucid 10.04
    Running Compiz Fusion across Dual LCD monitors on nVidia 7300

    Lucid fixed so much on my MacBook 2.0 GHz, 2GB RAM, 200GB

  2. #2
    Join Date
    May 2007
    Location
    STL, MO
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    1,283
    Distro
    Kubuntu Karmic Koala (testing)

    Re: tar Takes forever

    Quote Originally Posted by slick666 View Post
    Dear forum,

    What I wanted to do is backup my home directory and install 10.04 (I had 9.04) and then restore the home directory. My home dir was about 150 GBytes. I ran the command below
    Code:
    tar --use-compress-program=lzop -cf homeDir.tar.lzop /home/user
    I then ran
    Code:
    lzop -t homeDir.tar.lzop
    to test it and it tested out fine. It compressed it down to about 110 GBytes. I copied the file off the machine and installed 10.04.

    On the new system I copied the file on and first decompressed it using this command
    Code:
    lzop -x homeDir.tar.lzop
    and it gave me the file homeDir.tar.

    I'm now trying to untar the file but everything seems to hang. Right now I'm executing
    Code:
    time tar --extract homeDir.tar
    and it's just sitting there. I copied the tar file off onto another system and it's doing the same thing. I've let this thing run now for about 3 hours with no change.

    I know archive the files might add some overhead but it only took me an hour to archive and compress it to begin with. Add to that I transfered the uncompressed in an hour. At this rate it would have made more sense to scp the files over directly. Why would it take this long to unarchive this file?

    Any thoughts appreciated.
    try adding -vv or -v after tar to give you more output.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Nov 2009
    Location
    Madrid, Spain
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    1,403
    Distro
    Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin

    Re: tar Takes forever

    You can list the contents of your tar file typing this command

    tar tvf homeDir.tar
    Best regards,

    Luis

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Apr 2006
    Location
    Kansas City
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    213
    Distro
    Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal

    Re: tar Takes forever

    I've tried the -v and -vv options too
    Code:
    tar -xvvf homeDir.tar
    It gave me the same output. I've let the script run for 11 hours now but I'll be back to check on it later. I have the time option just in case it finishes.
    Ubuntu Lucid 10.04
    Running Compiz Fusion across Dual LCD monitors on nVidia 7300

    Lucid fixed so much on my MacBook 2.0 GHz, 2GB RAM, 200GB

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Nov 2009
    Location
    Madrid, Spain
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    Distro
    Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin

    Re: tar Takes forever

    The problem is probably related to the writing of the files because some of the destinations files can be locked by the different programs that you are running. So I recommend to check the contents of the tar file using the t option and not the x.

    tar tvf homeDir.tar

    If the tar file is Ok, you could try to restore the content of the tar file in a temporary directory different than /home/user. In a next step you could try to move the files or directories from this temporary directory to the /home/user.
    Last edited by lmarmisa; May 8th, 2010 at 07:30 AM.

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Apr 2006
    Location
    Kansas City
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    213
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    Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal

    Re: tar Takes forever

    What I ended up doing for the extraction was to extract under root in the /root folder. what I would expect is that all the directories under the home directory would appear. I'm not using the verbose option but the program has been running on two computer for almost 70 hours now. It only took an hour to compress in the first place so something has gone wrong.

    File roller seems to be able to look in the archive and pull out individual files so I'm going to try that and see if I can get anywhere.
    Ubuntu Lucid 10.04
    Running Compiz Fusion across Dual LCD monitors on nVidia 7300

    Lucid fixed so much on my MacBook 2.0 GHz, 2GB RAM, 200GB

  7. #7
    Join Date
    Apr 2006
    Location
    Kansas City
    Beans
    213
    Distro
    Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal

    Re: tar Takes forever

    Man I can't believe this works
    Code:
    tar --use-compress-program=lzop -xvf homeDir.tar.lzop
    Why would this work and not the other way that I tried?
    Ubuntu Lucid 10.04
    Running Compiz Fusion across Dual LCD monitors on nVidia 7300

    Lucid fixed so much on my MacBook 2.0 GHz, 2GB RAM, 200GB

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