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From: Eze on 1 Jan 2010 19:40
I see the point of using tar in order to, say, send a whole directory
as a single attachment file. I realize historically this "tape
archive" utility may have been needed for some technical reasons. But
I don't see the advantages of using tar to back up some files and copy
them to some external storage device. Couldn't you just cp? The files
would already been untarred...

I bring this up because it has been winner or runner-up of the Linux
Journal Readers' Choice Awards as Favorite Backup Utility for several
years. It is also recommended as a "quick and dirty" backup tool at
http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/articles/Jeremys_Magazine_Articles/Quick_and_Dirty_Backups.

Would someone care to shed some light?

Thanks,

Eze
From: Sidney Lambe on 1 Jan 2010 19:52
On comp.unix.shell, Eze <garzon.lucero(a)gmail.com> wrote:

> I see the point of using tar in order to, say, send a whole
> directory as a single attachment file. I realize historically
> this "tape archive" utility may have been needed for some
> technical reasons. But I don't see the advantages of using tar
> to back up some files and copy them to some external storage
> device. Couldn't you just cp? The files would already been
> untarred...
>
> I bring this up because it has been winner or runner-up
> of the Linux Journal Readers' Choice Awards as
> Favorite Backup Utility for several years. It is also
> recommended as a "quick and dirty" backup tool at
> http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/articles/Jeremys_Magazine_A
> rticles/Quick_and_Dirty_Backups.
>
> Would someone care to shed some light?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Eze

If you'd just _try_ both methods, you'd soon learn the
answer to your question.

Why do you imagine that the whole rest of the unix/linux
world doesn't know what they are doing?

Sid



From: Karsten Kruse on 1 Jan 2010 20:37
Eze schrieb:

> I don't see the advantages of using tar to back up some files and copy
> them to some external storage device. Couldn't you just cp? The files
> would already been untarred...

You could name your tar archives like that:

full_backup_friday.tar
incremental_backup_monday.tar
incremental_backup_tuesday.tar
incremental_backup_wednesday.tar
incremental_backup_thursday.tar

That's kind of hard to do with cp. So it's about organisation of your
backups.

Tar also has many options to choose, it can verify the archive with the
disk content, cp can't do that. It can save space with sparse files, it
works remote via rsh. It can also compress while archiving, unlike cp.

Karsten

--

() My homepage is http://www.tecneeq.de/ and your homepage sucks�!
<\/>
_/\_ �) Unless it has animated gifs from 1996, then it rocks!
From: Eze on 1 Jan 2010 21:20
> If you'd just _try_ both methods, you'd soon learn the
> answer to your question.

I did try, successfully. In fact, lumping many files into one can
easily take you to >4GB, which makes it hard to use the rather common
FAT32 filesystem for external drives, while this is not an issue as
long as your individual files don't go over that limit. I know unix
experts would not use FAT32 at all, but so far I can only see
disadvantages. However, the popularity of tar tells me I'm missing
something.

> Why do you imagine that the whole rest of the unix/linux
> world doesn't know what they are doing?

If I imagined that I wouldn't be asking, but thanks anyway.
From: Eze on 1 Jan 2010 21:26
Thanks, Karsten.

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