I'd prefer tar.  It deals with active filesystems better than dump.  And
it's more portable.

Say you ever change your mind and decide to move to NetApp, Onstor, or
Agami.  Your NDMP backups won't work on any of them, so you'll have to
do legacy restores using a Unix box.  If the backup format is tar,
you'll be able to use just about anything that smells of Linux, possibly
even Windows.  If it's in dump format, your choices are much more
limited.

---
W. Curtis Preston, Author of Backup & Recovery and Using SANs and NAS
VP Data Protection
GlassHouse Technologies


-----Original Message-----
From: EMC NetWorker discussion [mailto:NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU] On
Behalf Of Darren Dunham
Sent: Thursday, December 07, 2006 12:44 PM
To: NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [Networker] NDMP - tar versus dump

> We are setting up NDMP backup from our celerra (DDS attached LTO3
drives, 
> 2gbit fibre channel) and have the option of either dump or tar.  Both
seem 
> to work, I don't see major differences in the time to backup between
the 
> two.  I'm seeing throughput averaging about 35MB/sec for both methods
on a 
> single datamover.
> 
> Any reason to go with one method over the other?
> Any tricks to improving the throughput?

Does DAR work with either or both?  If all the data is in both, and the
recovery setup can find the data, I don't know that I would care about
the format.

-- 
Darren Dunham                                           ddunham AT taos DOT com
Senior Technical Consultant         TAOS            http://www.taos.com/
Got some Dr Pepper?                           San Francisco, CA bay area
         < This line left intentionally blank to confuse you. >

To sign off this list, send email to listserv AT listserv.temple DOT edu and
type "signoff networker" in the body of the email. Please write to
networker-request AT listserv.temple DOT edu if you have any problems with this
list. You can access the archives at
http://listserv.temple.edu/archives/networker.html or
via RSS at http://listserv.temple.edu/cgi-bin/wa?RSS&L=NETWORKER

To sign off this list, send email to listserv AT listserv.temple DOT edu and 
type "signoff networker" in the body of the email. Please write to 
networker-request AT listserv.temple DOT edu if you have any problems with this 
list. You can access the archives at 
http://listserv.temple.edu/archives/networker.html or
via RSS at http://listserv.temple.edu/cgi-bin/wa?RSS&L=NETWORKER