Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2000 15:28:42 +0000 (UTC) From: naddy@mips.inka.de (Christian Weisgerber) To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: standard backup programs Message-ID: <8rkr3a$2g7b$1@kemoauc.mips.inka.de> References: <20001006135943.B59999@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org>
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j mckitrick <jcm@FreeBSD-uk.eu.org> wrote: > I checked out the backupcentral comparison of unix backup progs. One of the > big issues for me is incrementals. The only two basic backup tools to support incrementals are dump and GNU tar. > The man page for tar claims it does them, but it doesn't mention > if it uses a stamp file, like dumpdates. It does. You need to call it with "-g listfile". Although our in-tree tar is a version of GNU tar, it has deviated quite a bit from the FSF's latest (beta) release 1.13.17. I mention this because I haven't tried incrementals at all with our tar. I currently do run a backup of an OpenBSD box with FSF GNU tar, because I need both incrementals and the ability to exclude directory trees there. This seems to work, although admittely I haven't done much restoring yet. FWIW, a port of the latest version of FSF GNU tar is available as ports/sysutils/gtar. > Also, at the risk of being branded as a luser, I would like to be able to > browse my backups easily with midc, and so far, only tar does that. Well, this looks more like a Midnight Commander issue to me. If you insist on using midc, and if it only supports tar, then that's it. The tar format itself is not conducive to easy browsing since it doesn't have a central index. Instead, you need to read through all the archive. Try browsing a 20GB tape, and you'll understand why this sucks. dump/restore has the advantage that dump creates an index of all files and directories at the beginning of the archive. To interactively browse the archive, use "restore -i". This only needs to read in the index, which is a tiny fraction of the size of the complete archive. Much more convenient. > If I do not need system critical filesystem backups, but just > personal archives and backups to a zip disk, is there any reason > to use anything besides tar? Phrased like that, no. If a few selected directory trees are all you want to save, tar (or its siblings cpio and pax) is the right choice. > Greg Lehey said it the book tar can do about all you need, but I just wanted > to get a few other opinions. Yeah, well, Greg is a bit biased in favor of tar and against dump/restore. -- Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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