Partitions, GNU tar, and dump

[Glenn Mackintosh]

dave at imax.com (Dave Martindale) writes:

>In a previous message, I stated that dump was still necessary because GNU
>tar could not do incremental dumps.  As several people have pointed out,
>GNU tar *does* do incremental dumps.  I must plead guilty to temporary
>insanity.  I had confused the public domain tar written by John Gilmore
><gnu at toad.com> (which I use), with the genuine GNU tar.

However, tar does have the problem that it fills in holes in files. This
means that databses that fit on your disk but contain chunks that don't
actually have blocks assigned to them suddenly get much bigger, perhaps
even too big for your disk if the holes are very big, if you try and
recover it from a tar'ed tape.

                    Glenn Mackintosh
                    Univ. of Toronto

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