On 2015-03-04 Wed 07:22 AM |, Ed Ahlsen-Girard wrote: > > I thought tar | tar would get everything. >
18.10.7 Which Backup Program Is Best? dump(8) Period. Elizabeth D. Zwicky torture tested all the backup programs discussed here. The clear choice for preserving all your data and all the peculiarities of UNIX file systems is dump. Elizabeth created file systems containing a large variety of unusual conditions (and some not so unusual ones) and tested each program by doing a backup and restore of those file systems. The peculiarities included: files with holes, files with holes and a block of nulls, files with funny characters in their names, unreadable and unwritable files, devices, files that change size during the backup, files that are created/deleted during the backup and more. 5.0 Conclusions (Zwicky): These results are in most cases stunningly appalling. dump comes out ahead, which is no great surprise. Tools tested were: tar, gnutar, bar, cpio, pax, afio, fbackup, and bru. Almost all backup utilities are based on these tools underneath. Others use rsync, which is also not as reliable as dump as like the other tools, it does not work with the raw binary data of an (unmounted) disk. References: http://archive-org.com/page/3589638/2014-01-25/http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/backup-basics.html http://www.coredumps.de/doc/dump/zwicky/testdump.doc.html -- Everybody's Free To Wear Sunscreen http://youtu.be/sTJ7AzBIJoI
