On Fri, 16 Aug 2002, Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:

> Tread lightly -- thar be dragons here.  :)  They both have their pros and
> cons, and it can be a matter of deep seated religous belief for people.
> FS specific dump programs can back up things that tar doesn't know about
> (e.g. ACLs), and can sometimes be faster.  But they're limited to
> partitions only, and require that the recovery machine have them
> installed.  Tar can do subdirectories and doesn't care about OS/FS (and
> thus you can recover on just about any machine).
>
> It's all a matter of choice.

Basically I agree with Joshua, with one addition.  For Linux systems
stick with tar.  dump on Linux is, well, not know for being robust.

-Mitch