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Date:      31 Dec 1999 04:40:49 +0100
From:      naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de (Christian Weisgerber)
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: how to do a backup
Message-ID:  <84h8k1$40v$1@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de>
References:  <19991230.2052000@cx264598-a.mesa1.az.home.com> <19991231100253.A473@freebie.lemis.com>

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Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> wrote:

> There are many.  I use tar.  Others use dump.  When making the choice,
> remember that you can read tapes written by tar on just about any
> machine.

FreeBSD's tar is GNU tar, which doesn't even write POSIX ustar
archives. As soon as you are running into things such as path names
>100 characters, GNU tar will resort to proprietary extensions that
are not generally understood by other tars. Also, GNU tar can't
handle all of FreeBSD's device nodes.

You don't have an index--looking up a file requires reading through
all the archive--and there is no internal buffering, which depending
on the peculiars of your system may require workarounds with
ports/misc/buffer or ports/misc/team to keep your drive streaming.
If I wanted to use tar, I'd at least use ports/sysutils/star.

> If you use dump, you're pretty well restricted to BSD,

Coincidental emperic evidence suggests that dumps are compatible
across FreeBSD-Linux-Solaris.

> and I'm not even sure if you can read a FreeBSD dump on other
> flavours of BSD.

Let's see...
Now restoring the dump of a root partition of a FreeBSD/i386 box
on OpenBSD/sparc...

Works like charm. The device nodes are truncated to OpenBSDish
8-bit minor numbers. Oops. The OpenBSD box is running securelevel
1, and now I can't get rid of the files restored with the schg
flag. :-)

-- 
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                  naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de



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