A decade and a half ago, I wrote an Oracle archived log that I had compressed with bzip2 to a DLT40 tape.
I recovered and uncompressed (without error) the log, then tried to apply it to a database recovery which rejected it as corrupt.
After several attempts to read the tape (amounting to dozens of hours), I finally put it in the original drive that wrote it and pulled the file to the remote recovery system - this worked.
I immediately began including PAR2 files on the tapes, so the restored contents could be verified and corrected.
I have my doubts that bzip2 is as sensitive to corruption as the author of asserts, but perhaps there have been improvements to the code since my misfortune.
Comments
A decade and a half ago, I wrote an Oracle archived log that I had compressed with bzip2 to a DLT40 tape.
I recovered and uncompressed (without error) the log, then tried to apply it to a database recovery which rejected it as corrupt.
After several attempts to read the tape (amounting to dozens of hours), I finally put it in the original drive that wrote it and pulled the file to the remote recovery system - this worked.
I immediately began including PAR2 files on the tapes, so the restored contents could be verified and corrected.
I have my doubts that bzip2 is as sensitive to corruption as the author of asserts, but perhaps there have been improvements to the code since my misfortune.