tar: Data corruption and repair

1 
1 10.1.2 Data Corruption and Repair
1 ---------------------------------
1 
1 If an archive becomes corrupted by an I/O error, this may corrupt the
1 data in an extracted file.  Worse, it may corrupt the file's metadata,
1 which may cause later parts of the archive to become misinterpreted.  An
1 tar-format archive contains a checksum that most likely will detect
1 errors in the metadata, but it will not detect errors in the data.
1 
1    If data corruption is a concern, you can compute and check your own
1 checksums of an archive by using other programs, such as 'cksum'.
1 
1    When attempting to recover from a read error or data corruption in an
1 archive, you may need to skip past the questionable data and read the
1 rest of the archive.  This requires some expertise in the archive format
1 and in other software tools.
1