[plug] Backups

[James Devenish]

Hi,

Sorry I don't have time to reply to the last few posts properly, but
just quickly.

In message <4107109C.9090503 at smlintl.com.au>
on Wed, Jul 28, 2004 at 10:34:04AM +0800, Marc Wiriadisastra wrote:
> Yeah not 100% sure yet how its all going to go because upon further 
> reading from people offering advise they say use dump for full 
> filesystems and incremetanl full filesystems but use tar for the 
> specifics

Okay, I think the problem is this: while dump works fine for specifics,
it will not do incremental backups for them (it will only do
incrementals for entire filesystems). If you were doing your whole
filesytem, you could look at it this way: the dump will give you a more
faithful restoration (and not interfere with your atimes) compared to
tar, even though tar is a more generally-applicable and is used vastly
for day-to-day tasks. People are simply more accustomed to using tar.
tar can be used by non-root users and its archives work independently of
platform and filesystem. (Obviously, tar and cpio get a lot of use for
the specific purpose of backups, but aren't not so good for restoring a
machine to its 'exact' previous state.) By the way, there's nothing to
stop you from trying both of these solutions (or any other solution).
tar won't give you incrementals automatically, but if you are only
backing up once per week to plentiful fixed media, incrementals might
not be so important to you. dump, however, can write an independent
'table of contents', which can be faster than having to get tar to trawl
through the entire DVD just to find specific files.