From owner-freebsd-stable Wed Apr 28 15:41:19 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from guru.phone.net (guru.phone.net [209.157.82.120]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 63719154C4 for ; Wed, 28 Apr 1999 15:41:05 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mwm@phone.net) Received: (qmail 22487 invoked by uid 100); 28 Apr 1999 22:41:05 -0000 Received: from localhost (sendmail-bs@127.0.0.1) by localhost with SMTP; 28 Apr 1999 22:41:05 -0000 Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 15:41:05 -0700 (PDT) From: Mike Meyer To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Does tar do sparse files these days In-Reply-To: <7g7vdc$3e6$1@mips.rhein-neckar.de> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On 28 Apr 1999, Christian Weisgerber wrote: > Brian O'Connor. CF583173 HO 2nd Floor wrote: > > > In the dim dark days of yore(90-91) I was advised not to do full backups > > using tar. There were problems with sparse files, and device files etc. > > There still are. > > GNU tar, which FreeBSD uses, can't handle 32-bit dev_t. Apparently this > is a limitation of the archive format. Yup. If you check the source (/usr/src/gnu/usr.bin/tar/tar.h) you'll see that it's using an eight byte field to hold the ASCII version of the major and minor device numbers. The handbook says only dump can be trusted. I'm not sure how amanda fits into this picture.