I had over 20G of data that I wanted to backup before I re-build my linux
machine. Due to disk space constraints, I tarred it all up and then
compressed it using bzip2. It shrank down to around 11G file. Before
storing the data file, I verified bzip2 integrity using bzip2 utility.
There are other alternatives to doing a more reliable backup, but this
process seemed pretty fast and simple.

Everything was fine until I copied the data file back and tried
decompressing it. bzip2 utility complained about CRC errors. Hence I used
bzip2recover to recover undamanged bzip2 blocks. Uusually those blocks
(depending on how they are intially set when creating bz2 compressed file)
are 900K chunks. bzip2recover utility apparently receovered all 13500~
blocks, and stored them in 900K sized bz2-format files.

So in order to get the orignal 20G tar file, I started unziping each
compressed block and then combining the resulting data files together. That
process is quite lenghty and taking a long time.

"David Utidjian" <utidjian@nospamremarque.org> wrote in message
news:pan.2003.06.28.19.37.00.971319.2168@nospamrem arque.org...
> Interesting problem.
>
> Why is it useful for you to have 10,000 1M files rolled into one huge
> file?
>
> -DU-...etc...