On 1 Jan 2003 at 11:58am, Kirk Strauser wrote

> I'm using Amanda on a mixed network of Linux and FreeBSD machines.  The
> default installation of Amanda on FreeBSD defines --with-user=operator and
> --with-group=operator .  It occurs to me that I have many files that aren't
> world-readable.  Can tar backup these files?  Wouldn't it be running as
> operator and not root?
> 
> My disk devices are owned by operator, so using dump instead of tar should
> catch everything, but I'd been persuaded that dump is bad for backing up
> live filesystems on Linux and FreeBSD.  Have I migrated away from that
> utility at the expense of skipping the non-world-readble files on my system,
> many of which are the most important files on my network?

Amanda uses a suid wrapper to run tar as root when making backups.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University