10.1 Reliability

Ideally, when tar is creating an archive, it reads from a file system that is not being modified, and encounters no errors or inconsistencies while reading and writing. If this is the case, the archive should faithfully reflect what was read. Similarly, when extracting from an archive, ideally tar ideally encounters no errors and the extracted files faithfully reflect what was in the archive.

However, when reading or writing real-world file systems, several things can go wrong; these include permissions problems, corruption of data, and race conditions.

10.1.1 Permissions Problems

If tar encounters errors while reading or writing files, it normally reports an error and exits with nonzero status. The work it does may therefore be incomplete. For example, when creating an archive, if tar cannot read a file then it cannot copy the file into the archive.

10.1.2 Data Corruption and Repair

If an archive becomes corrupted by an I/O error, this may corrupt the data in an extracted file. Worse, it may corrupt the file’s metadata, which may cause later parts of the archive to become misinterpreted. An tar-format archive contains a checksum that most likely will detect errors in the metadata, but it will not detect errors in the data.

If data corruption is a concern, you can compute and check your own checksums of an archive by using other programs, such as cksum.

When attempting to recover from a read error or data corruption in an archive, you may need to skip past the questionable data and read the rest of the archive. This requires some expertise in the archive format and in other software tools.

10.1.3 Race conditions

If some other process is modifying the file system while tar is reading or writing files, the result may well be inconsistent due to race conditions. For example, if another process creates some files in a directory while tar is creating an archive containing the directory’s files, tar may see some of the files but not others, or it may see a file that is in the process of being created. The resulting archive may not be a snapshot of the file system at any point in time. If an application such as a database system depends on an accurate snapshot, restoring from the tar archive of a live file system may therefore break that consistency and may break the application. The simplest way to avoid the consistency issues is to avoid making other changes to the file system while tar is reading it or writing it.

When creating an archive, several options are available to avoid race conditions. Some hosts have a way of snapshotting a file system, or of temporarily suspending all changes to a file system, by (say) suspending the only virtual machine that can modify a file system; if you use these facilities and have tar -c read from a snapshot when creating an archive, you can avoid inconsistency problems. More drastically, before starting tar you could suspend or shut down all processes other than tar that have access to the file system, or you could unmount the file system and then mount it read-only.

When extracting from an archive, one approach to avoid race conditions is to create a directory that no other process can write to, and extract into that.

This document was generated on August 23, 2023 using texi2html 5.0.