tar from disk to time capsule does not preserve times!

Hello
I have been doing a tar archive with
tar -c -f file.tar folder

Making it either on the external HFS+ drive connected through FireWire or on my internal drive when I decompress the archive in a local (internal or external drive) the dates are ok.

On the contrary, if I do the same compressing a file that is on my time capsule drive the file get decompressed and do not maintains the modification times of the files ... I am wondering why such behavior ... any idea?

Is there any setting in making or decompressing the tar that forces to be as faithful as possible with the dates? or is it a time capsule/generic nas drive issue?

Thanks
Roberto

PS
"cp -p" is not an option for me, as I must move to the time capsule 150 Gb of very small files, which takes forever (ETA 100 days!), as opposed to few tens of hours to move the tar file and decompress it on the time capsule.

Maybe dd can help?

Man tar


Look at --atime-preserve

Hello Dysfunction, thanks for replying ...

~>tar --atime-preserve
tar: Option --atime-preserve is not supported
Usage:
List: tar -tf <archive-filename>
Extract: tar -xf <archive-filename>
Create: tar -cf <archive-filename> [filenames...]
Help: tar --help


On mac os x 10.7 there is bsdtar

to be precise
~>tar --version
bsdtar 2.8.3 - libarchive 2.8.3

which apparently does noto have this option "--atime-preserve" that I also read about while googling this subject.

How can such possibility miss in bsdtar? apparently it is the default, just when you decompress on a time capsule it goes crazy ...

Anybody have the same problem?

From the OS X manpage...

-p (x mode only) Preserve file permissions. Attempt to restore the full permissions, including owner, file modes, file flags and ACLs, if available, for each item extracted
from the archive. By default, newly-created files are owned by the user running tar, the file mode is restored for newly-created regular files, and all other types of
entries receive default permissions. If tar is being run by root, the default is to restore the owner unless the -o option is also specified.

Now that states permissions, I haven't tried dates. In general, I really don't care about mtime in a tarball. Permissions? Yep.

Now, if this is ONLY occurring on the external disk.. maybe there's another reason for this that is escaping me at the moment. Perhaps AFP doesn't allow for preservation of mtime or atime.

I read this last night and half wondered if it could be something to do with AFP. Not actually having a capsule I don't know what options are available. Could reverting to SAMBA help? :s

I should probably move this to the time capsule discussion area, indeed seems more an issue with net drives than anything else ...

Anyways I wanted to thank those who replied and those who read the thread.

Best
Roberto