04-11-2012
Speed problems with tar'ing a 500Gb directory on an eSATA drive
I'm trying to compress a directory structure on an external hard drive, connected by eSATA cable to my linux (Ubuntu 10.04) desktop. The total volume is 500Gb with half a million files, ranging from Kb to Mb in size. The drive is 2Tb, with 0.8Tb free space before compression.
running "tar -pcf directory.tar directory" worked for a previous, entirely analogous, 400Gb set of data in about 10 hours.
This time, the command has been running for 7 days, and the tar file is now only growing at 2 Gb/hour - estimated another 50+ days for completion.
I've run it twice now (the cable fell out the first time after two days) and the lack of results is reproducible. Deleting some of the other data from the external drive made no difference.
I'm about to try installing a large RAID0 system in the linux desktop (current drive is almost full), do a straight cp of the directory to there, and repeat the tar locally.
But if anyone has any ideas why this process might be so painfully slow it would be appreciated!
Thanks.
Simon
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LEARN ABOUT LINUX
shtool-tarball
SHTOOL-TARBALL.TMP(1) GNU Portable Shell Tool SHTOOL-TARBALL.TMP(1)
NAME
shtool-tarball - GNU shtool command for rolling standardized tarballs
SYNOPSIS
shtool tarball [-t|--trace] [-v|--verbose] [-o|--output tarball] [-c|--compress prog] [-d|--directory directory] [-u|--user user]
[-g|--group group] [-e|--exclude pattern] path [path ...]
DESCRIPTION
This command is for rolling input files under path into a distribution tarballs which can be extracted by tar(1).
The four important aspects of good open source software tarballs are: (1) unpack into a single top-level directory, (2) top-level directory
corresponds to the tarball filename, (3) tarball files should be sorted and (4) arbitrary names for file owner and group.
OPTIONS
The following command line options are available.
-v, --verbose
Display some processing information.
-t, --trace
Enable the output of the essential shell commands which are executed.
-o, --output tarball
Output tarball to file tarball.
-c, --compress prog
Pipe resulting tarball through compression program prog.
-d, --directory directory
Sets the top-level directory into which the tarball unpacks. By default it is tarball without the trailing ".tar.*" extension.
-u, --user user
The user (owner) of files and directories in the tarball to user.
-g, --group group
The group of files and directories in the tarball to group.
-e, --exclude pattern
Exclude files and directories matching comma-separated list of regex pattern from the tarball. Directories are expanded before the
filtering takes place. The default filter pattern is ""CVS,\.cvsignore,\.svn,\.[oa]$"".
EXAMPLE
# Makefile.in
dist:
...
V=`shtool version -d short ...`;
shtool tarball -o foobar-$$V.tar.gz -c 'gzip -9'
-u bar -g gnu -e 'CVS,.cvsignore' .
HISTORY
The GNU shtool tarball command was originally written by Ralf S. Engelschall <rse@engelschall.com> in 1999 for GNU shtool.
SEE ALSO
shtool(1), tar(1), compress(1).
18-Jul-2008 shtool 2.0.8 SHTOOL-TARBALL.TMP(1)