Decompress multiple zstaa backups on FAT32 drives about zstd

[Cyan4973]

Ah, you cut after compression, not before.

In this case, this is more like :

cat *.zst* | zstd -d > dest.tar

Same idea here, this only works if expansion of *.zst* is properly ordered.

[oDinZu]

That worked! You rock and thank you! Now, to simplify the command and also untar 😄

For others on the internet, the one liner I made use of to tar and compress with zstd.

I backed up ~120GB SSD onto a FAT32 1.5TB disk drive in less than 15 minutes with default compression algorithms 🎉

Thank you zstd! 🙌

Compress / Decompress Huge Files via zstd with PROGRESS indication via PV

The required packages are:

• tar
• pv
• zstd
• dosfsck

Check the filesize in chunks for the FAT32 drive

sudo dosfsck -v -n /dev/sda1

File size is 4294967295 bytes, cluster chain length is 0 bytes.

Split the tar into files to transport between drives e.g. FAT32 formatted drive and filter/compress with zstd with -I option into another drive, while visualizing a progress counter with pv.

tar -I zstd -cf - Desktop/ | (pv -p --timer --rate --bytes | split --bytes=4294967295 - /run/media/username/Backups/System/Linux/Desktop/Desktop.backup.tar.zst)

Decompress multiple zst files between drives

cat *.zst* | zstd -d > /home/username/dest.tar

Then extract the archive

tar -xvf dest.tar

or extract the archive into specific directory

tar -xvf dest.tar -C /opt/files

[Cyan4973]

The *.zst suffix requirement is because the CLI must determine a destination filename.
If it doesn't need to generate such a name, the *.zst requirement is dropped.

So one way to achieve your objective could be :

zstd -d *.zst* -c > dest.tar

This however implies that *zst* shell expansion is properly ordered, which I'm not sure of.
There are probably more elaborated way to generate this list of files that would guarantee proper alphabetical order.
But you get the idea for the zstd part.

[oDinZu]

I tried that and received and error, but the file size seems to have added another file; each zst is 4.3GB and the dest.tar is now 8.2GB..or maybe that is the actual size uncompressed:

zstd -d *.zst* -c > /home/username/dest.tar

top.backup.tar.zstaa : Read error (39) : premature end 
zstd: Desktop.backup.tar.zstab: unsupported format 
zstd: Desktop.backup.tar.zstac: unsupported format 
zstd: Desktop.backup.tar.zstad: unsupported format 
zstd: Desktop.backup.tar.zstae: unsupported format 
zstd: Desktop.backup.tar.zstaf: unsupported format 
zstd: Desktop.backup.tar.zstag: unsupported format

Also,
*** Zstandard CLI (64-bit) v1.5.5, by Yann Collet ***