Re: [Evolution] Restoring Evolution

[Ralf Mardorf <silver bullet zoho com>]

On Mon, 2022-08-29 at 18:33 -0700, Mr.J wrote:
> Could the size of the file caused the problem?

Hi,

yesno. It depends on the file system and the size of the archive, so
indeed, yes, the file can become too large to fit. When generating the
archive and the size or any other issue should be the cause for an
error, then tar should return an exit status greater than zero. IOW tar
should inform you about the error already when creating the archive
fails.

My guess is, that Evolution isn't the culprit, but tar is the culprit.

I'm doing regular backups by command line using tar and very seldom, but
OTOH that often that it stands out, the archives are corrupted. I'm
doing my backups by rotation on many different external drives, that are
for sure 100% ok. The backups are done by a script writing the exit
status of each tar command to a log file. All corrupted archives were
created with an exit status 0, IOW without an error. Btw. usually my
scripts are generate tar.gz archives, too.

When the archives are created and saved, my backups are not done. I
don't trust the exit status of tar. Right after the archives are saved I
open all archives for testing purpose. If an archive is corrupted, I
repeat the backup.

FWIW USB to SATA can be a pain, too. However, if something is fishy with
this, then you get informed about IO errors, a read-only drive or
similar. Such mistakes do not go unnoticed, the exit status of tar is
always greater than zero.

Regards,
Ralf