The star utility is the fastest known implementation of tar. It has been tested at speeds exceeding 14 MB/s. (This is more than double the speed that dump gets.) star development started in 1982 and is still in progress. star ’s main advantages over other tar implementations are:
- FIFO
This is a “double-buffering” system that keeps the tape streaming. This gives you faster backups than you can achieve with dump, if the size of the filesystem is > 1 GB.
- Sophisticated diff
It has a user-tailorable interface for comparing tar archives against file trees.
- Longer pathname length
You may archive pathnames up to 1024 bytes, as you can with dump.
- Does not clobber files
More recent copies on disk will not be clobbered from the backup volume. This may be the main advantage over other tar implementations. This allows automatic repair of a corrupted filesystem. (You can check for differences after doing this with the
diffoption.)- Automatic byte swap
star automatically detects swapped archives and transparently reads them the right way.
star is available from ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix/star.
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