backups

[Kenneth Porter]

--On Sunday, September 19, 2004 9:48 PM -0400 Colin Walters 
<walters at redhat.com> wrote:

> Well, it's not quite the same thing.  You can't safely dump a live
> filesystem, making it unusable for me.

An explanation of the issue and why it not be an issue, depending on the 
situation:

<http://dump.sourceforge.net/isdumpdeprecated.html>

> Also it's far less granular than an archiver like tar or dar.

It sounded like you were doing filesystem-level backups (including 
incrementals), not archives of isolated directory trees. Dump is very good 
for that.

Do you use any sparely allocated files? How is tar at handling those? 
Dump's restore will restore all the holes as holes, instead of allocating 
zero-filled disk blocks.