GNU-tar vs dump(1)

Eric Gisin egisin at mks.UUCP
Wed Jan 4 09:09:28 AEST 1989


One of the potential problems with using tar or cpio for backups
is that a sparse file (one with unallocated blocks)
that uses little disk space will use more space in the backup.
A sparse file can be created by a buggy program or by a user:
	$ adb -w big
	0t100000000?w0
	^D
	$ ls -ls big
	  24 -rw-r--r--  1 egisin   100000004 Jan  3 17:59 big
This file uses 24K on the BSD filesytem, and about 100M in a tar backup.



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