8.3.6 afio

afio is a better way of dealing with cpio-format archives. It is generally faster than cpio, provides more diverse magnetic tape options and deals somewhat gracefully with input data corruption. It supports multivolume 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.

     $ find . -depth -print0 | afio -px -0a new-dir

All my backups onto tape use afio.