Star is the best program for automatically recovering from system crashes. Consider the case where you have a corrupted filesystem and no actual backup. It can be repaired with only few manual actions by using star. Simply follow the following steps: 1) Do a fsck -y to repair the filesystem. Many files will be lost but you may have luck and some/all recent files remain intact. 2) Run star -xp from the most recent backup you have. This will only extract all files that have been deleted on the fsck -y run. 3) Rewind the tape and run: star -diff -c diffopts=!times to check for file corruptions that have not been detected by the fsck -y run. 4) Do a full backup of the new system to prevent further data loss.