Running an ESXi 5.1 server. I ssh'ed into the server and manually did a 'tar czpf myVM.tgz VMfolder' for the VM I wanted to backup. The resulting tgz file is about 49GB, note that the VMfolder size was about 75GB. I then scp'ed the tgz file to a backup server.
As luck would have it, there was a RAID failure on that ESXI server's datastore and the VM was lost. A new RAID was created and I copied the tgz file to the new datastore, it's still the exact same server running ESXi 5.1, only the datastore was recreated. When I tried to decompress the tgz file on the ESXi server with 'tar xzpf myVM.tgz' I get this error after 15 seconds or so: tar: invalid tar magic
Note the partially extracted folder is only about 400MB, so some files did get extracted.I did a md5sum on the tgz and it matches the md5 of the file on the backup server. Furthermore I actually extracted the tgz file on the backup server with no problems, the resulting folder is 75GB as expected.
Any guesses on what the problem could be? It seems strange since I tar'ed it up in ESXi originally that I'm having problems extracting it.
