backups

[seth vidal]

On Sun, 2004-09-19 at 20:09 -0700, Kenneth Porter wrote:
> --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.

tar has a flag for handling sparse files.

-sv