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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!nntp.coast.net!howland.reston.ans.net!world1.bawave.com!news2.cais.net!news.cais.net!bofh.dot!news.mathworks.com!fu-berlin.de!zib-berlin.de!news.tu-chemnitz.de!irz401!uriah.heep!news From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: dump on a DAT tape .. Date: 18 May 1996 22:51:48 GMT Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden Lines: 40 Message-ID: <4nlka4$1l5@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <4mfon3$gib@news.simplex.nl> <4miicv$sb9@uriah.heep.sax.de> <4nd0kh$1bm@anorak.coverform.lan> Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.heep.sax.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.6 X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-PGP-Fingerprint: DC 47 E6 E4 FF A6 E9 8F 93 21 E0 7D F9 12 D6 4E brian@awfulhak.demon.co.uk (Brian Somers) wrote: > : I prefer dump(8) for full backups. > IMO, tar is infinitely better. tar is inherently broken. It only allows for 100 (or 255 -- Posix tar, but that's already another restriction) characters path name length, many tar's don't allow for device nodes or FIFO's, tar has problems extracting hardlinks if you wanna extract a subtree only, not all tar's handle the permissions correctly. tar's that can handle device nodes still break for 32-bit major/minor numbers as they are found in 4.4BSD descendants. tar is certainly the least common denominator, but that doesn't make it a good _backup_ program, only a good _data interchange_ program. (Don't tell me you won't be able to find another machine using UFS around. :) cpio has fewer braindamages than tar, particularly SVR4 cpio. Older cpio's are not much better however. dump/restore are only sharable among UFS architectures (and you will even find byteorder stuff in restore, suggesting it's possible to e.g. restore a SunOS 4 dump tape on FreeBSD!), but have the advantage to be featured for a good backup program. They don't suffer from any of the abovementioned braindeadnesses, and offer some other nice features like a multilevel incremental backup system that is even capable of deleting files that disappeared on the master between the backup increments, a TOC that's right at the beginning of your 5-tape backup, and the ability to interactively determine which files to restore (in a simple command-line shell-like interface). -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)