On Tue, May 10, 2005 at 10:03:44AM -0500, Dave Sherohman wrote:
> On Tue, May 10, 2005 at 09:31:46AM -0400, Guy Dallaire wrote:
> > I plan to use gnu tar instead of dump to take my amanda backups. Is it
> > as stable/safe as dump/ufsdump ? I need to be able to exclude files,
> > that's why I use gnu tar.
> 
> There are those who believe that tar is safer than dump, at least when
> running under Linux/ext2fs.  Linus Torvalds is one of them, although
> there are plenty of others who say that there's no significant difference
> either way.

I could be very wrong, I'm just asking...

I'd understood that the OS native dump could handle correctly certain
types of files that tar couldn't. Not an issue of binaries but rather
other types of special files. Is this or was this true ?

Even if it is, I have never had issues with tar vs dump for non-boot
partitions.

I have a preference for dump for user partitions but its an end-user
preference rather than a performance or safety one, we often use the
dump -i interactive switch to help us select the files to extract and
being able to walk the tree is not a feature of tar, though if you 
are building an index for amrecover to use it may be a non-issue (we
haven't done this at our site).


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   Brian R Cuttler                 brian.cuttler AT wadsworth DOT org
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