[OreoCookie]

Ok, it's almost 1 at nite here and I am fixing up my girlfriend's iBook. I have tarred all her stuff, e. g. I have a Pictures.tar containing all her pics. That file is about 645 Megs of size. When untaring it, I get about 86 Megs worth of files. Where is the rest?!

Well, I don't want to stay up all nite and she's gonna leave at 11.20 next morning. Other than that, I want to catch my usual 5 hours of sleep. So, any suggestions?

[utidjian]

Originally posted by OreoCookie:
Ok, it's almost 1 at nite here and I am fixing up my girlfriend's iBook. I have tarred all her stuff, e. g. I have a Pictures.tar containing all her pics. That file is about 645 Megs of size. When untaring it, I get about 86 Megs worth of files. Where is the rest?!

Well, I don't want to stay up all nite and she's gonna leave at 11.20 next morning. Other than that, I want to catch my usual 5 hours of sleep. So, any suggestions?

You actually read the manpage for tar??? You are a brave person indeed.

That is quite a difference in size... what are you using to determine the size of the extracted folder?

You can list all the files in an archive with:

tar -tvf somefile.tar | less

You can compare this output to an ls -R foldername/ of the folder you dmped them in to.

[Paul McCann]

While I don't much like being the bearer of bad news --and I hope that I'm wrong!-- you might well have run into one of the limitations of tar under OS X. It doesn't have a clue about resource forks and the like, so if the image files use the resource fork to store their image data (as I seem to remember some do) then that info has moved on to a better life elsewhere.

To back up such files you'll want to use something like hfstar or hfspax or a disk image (which you can eventually compress); search this forum for a list of possibilities.

Best of luck,
Paul

[OreoCookie]

Well, it lists what it extracts.
But when I manually do a

tar -xvf Pictures.tar iPhoto\ Library/2002/*

tar says that it could extract all contents and lists missing directory names that are not listed when extracting! And I haven't had a problem with tar in the past as far as resource forks are concerned. It has extracted the 2001-directory of the iPhoto Library, but 2002 and 2003 are missing!

[utidjian]

Originally posted by OreoCookie:
Well, it lists what it extracts.
But when I manually do a

tar -xvf Pictures.tar iPhoto\ Library/2002/*

tar says that it could extract all contents and lists missing directory names that are not listed when extracting! And I haven't had a problem with tar in the past as far as resource forks are concerned. It has extracted the 2001-directory of the iPhoto Library, but 2002 and 2003 are missing!

Ummm...

If you do this:

cd /
tar -cvf Pictures.tar /path/to/iPhoto\ Library/2002

Then later on you do:

cd /
cp /wherever/you/put/Pictures.tar .
tar -xvf Pictures.tar

It should extract the archive exactly as it was created.

Does it do that? If not... what are the exact commands you are using FROM where to create and extract these tarballs? It is extremely difficult to help you without the exact information.

[OreoCookie]

Well, the problem is not to tar it, but to untar it. I know how to tar different directories. But all I got is the backup tar file, I don't have access to the original files anymore!

[utidjian]

Originally posted by OreoCookie:
Well, the problem is not to tar it, but to untar it. I know how to tar different directories. But all I got is the backup tar file, I don't have access to the original files anymore!

OK... well do a plain old:

tar -xvf Pictures.tar

in some convenient folder and see what you get. What do you get?

You can also run:

tar -dvf Pictures.tar

in the same folder you just un-tarred in and see what the differences are.

As someone else mentioned before... if you created the archive from an HFS+ partition then things may get a bit screwy. Another thing that can screw it up is soft links outside the partition that the archive was from. Also any ":" in the filenames may have an affect.
You can also try the options --force-local -h and -l (see the manpage).