tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

  tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

Facing issues while taking backup of your important files. Here is the solutions of all your problems.

Recently I was taking backup of some of my huge important files. The size of all the files is around 50 GB. It includes my important files directory and their sub directory.

While taking backup u may face very common problems like:

1. What will the final tar file size?
2. Do you have sufficient space to store your back on your local drive?
3. What level tar archive level you should use?

As above problem also occurred to me when I've started taking backup of my huge files(around 50 GB).

So I've done many things in starting but I found that my actions are not sufficient to deal with the condition.

I used : tar -cvf Archive_File_Name.tar /path/1* /path/2* >>tar_log.log

By doing this I archived 50 GB of data into 25 GB tar file. But what I found that I saw an error 

"Error is not recoverable: exiting now" .  It means that tar command faced an error while making archive file.

The output 25 GB tar files also makes in running out of space.
Make sure you have disk formatted with higher ext. (like ext 2/3/4) Don't use fat formatted drive. It may create problem due to its limitation of size on for single file.

Error Description: Error is not recoverable : exiting now. It clearly indicates that tar command has failed to archived your all files/folders which you have passed as argument. It happens due to following conditions:

1. You are running out of space or inodes (on OEL).
2. Your files/folders are created by different user, so tar command don't have sufficient privilege to archive them. Or files/folders are in use.
3. You are running tar from already high CPU loaded machine.

Now to overcome from the problem, I tried the following command to get the highest archived tar files.

nice -n 19 tar -cvjf Archive_File_Name.tbz2 /path/1* /path/2* >>tar_log.log

Above command solved by all problems of Space, CPU.

Description:

1. nice -n 19 = Nice is the free utility available on most of the distribution of Linux/UNIX. It allows user to run the certain command in their manually defined priority.  Nice command have parameter 'n' which defined the priority of the task for CPU. Its range start from -20 to 19 where 19 is the lowest priority . For more details read Nice Wiki .  Nice -n 19 tells the CPU to schedule the tar command with the lowest priority.
2. tar -cvjf  = it shows the highest comparison from the tar command. Although tbz2 command takes lots of cpu and it is very critical to run the command on already loaded CPU. That's why we have used nice -n 19 to attache label with lowest priority command.

Run the above command. As the command will generate the archived file with the highest comparison, it may take some extra time to complete 100%. 

My first command took 4 hours to complete archive of 50 GB data generating 25 GB archived file .My second tbz2 command took 6.2 hours to complete archive of 50 GB data generating  only 4 GB of archived file. Isn't it amazing.

Now coming to the point. " tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors".  

Reason: Generally this error come when tar faced any issues while dealing with the input files/folder. It doesn't means that your tar is corrupt or tar is not complete.  So don't worry about the generated archive file. Your important files are backup properly.

But, focus on the error or messages available about  tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors. They will clearly mention the cause for this Error. It is always suggested to redirect the command output to a log file for future purpose.

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