from Hacker News

FSArchiver – Filesystem Archiver for Linux

by electricant on 9/13/22, 9:45 AM with 23 comments

• by ninefathom on 9/14/22, 2:06 AM

  This seems like it could be a useful tool. At first read, there's nothing here that cpio, md5sum, *zip*, and mkfs in tandem couldn't do, but it simplifies the process.

  The real question in my mind is if the "attic space" of learning a new tool and dragging it around everywhere is worth the convenience versus doing it The Old, Boring, Manual Way(TM). I suppose time will tell...

• by 8fingerlouie on 9/14/22, 12:35 PM

  Isn't this basically just "tar cvzf output.tar.gz /source/path" ?

  I'm sure there's more to it, but reading the description tar seems to check most of (if not all) the boxes.

  - File attributes (ownership, permissions, dates, etc)

  - Extended attributes

  - Multiple filesystems (tar is somewhat filesystem agnostic)

  - Splitting into multiple volumes (tar -M for multi volume)

  - Checksumming (tar does checksums on metadata, but not data)

  - Restoring corrupt archives (tar skips unreadable parts of the data stream)

• by dataflow on 9/14/22, 1:28 AM

  This sounds like it competes with... squashfs? Would be nice for them to have a comparison table.

• by cortesoft on 9/13/22, 11:51 PM

  > If the archive is corrupt, you just loose the current file, not the whole archive.

  > In case one file is damaged, FSArchiver will restore all the other files from your archive, so you won’t loose all your data.

  Loose instead of lose is one my biggest pet peeves, and it appears at least twice on the main page!

• by loeg on 9/13/22, 10:06 PM

  Seems like tar, with internal checksums (instead of external checksums or FEC). I'd just stick with tar and add some par2 blocks if you are worried about bitrot.