system reboots during backup

[BodOrange]

I'm wondering what could cause this: Whilst running a backup, my system is rebooting midway thru the operation and there seems to be a pattern. It happens without exception and seems to occur when tarring particular files. IMO this is more indicative of faulty memory rather than cpu problems but would appreciate any advice? Obviously I cannot access dmesg at appropriate time and the logs show nothing relevant. The machine is quite old but seems to perform ok in all other respects.
Thanks for any help.

[hermanng]

I had a similar problem on an old alpha-station. When I tried to access some specific files, the machine went down immediately. Obviously the scsi drive had some defect sectors (and the scsi driver was not too robust) The problems went away, when I removed the old disk. The logfiles never showed the problem, and reformatting didn`t help, the OS went down during the process as before.
So perhaps you could try to access these particular files with normal means (file,cat,less ...) and see if that works. If it fails too, good luck. In my case, I was able to backup parts of the disk with rsync though.
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Hermann