The past days I have been trying to rescue a few TB of data from a flaky system that reboots every hour or so.
I found tar almost completely unusable. Thought at first that I would use tar up to a crash, see how far it got, and start from there again, but as it turns out, tar treats symlinks specially and copies them as mode 0 files, only to restore the mode at the end. This means that partial tar results are no good. It would be nice if tar treated symlinks for just what they are: small files that contain a filename, and restored file and mode at the moment of extraction. Andries
