Afio makes cpio-format archives. It deals somewhat gracefully with input data corruption. Supports multi-volume archives during interactive operation. Afio can make compressed archives that are much safer than compressed tar or cpio archives. Afio is best used as an `archive engine' in a backup script. Afio has far too many options and features (some of which are not even in the manual page). Anything in afio that doesn't relate to reading or writing an archive from/to a simple file or pipe or backing up and restoring from floppies remains untested. Typical `tested' afio uses are ... | afio -o -v -f -b 1024 -s 1440x -F -Z /dev/fd0H1440 ... | afio -o -v -s 1440k -F -V -Z -G1 /dev/fd0H1440 afio -oZvx /tmp/pipe1 /dev/tty8 >/var/adm/backup WARNING: the code for -F (and -f and -K) is a complete mess. It will probably work in the normal case, but don't expect it to handle a write/verify error correctly. If you get such an error, best thing is to restart afio completely.