>v) Gene said: "Any partition thats that much gzipped already, should have the
>compression turned off, doing a straight tar of it."
>Again, I'm a newbie, and if I decided not to use tar, was not based on
>my own experience but from what I've read elsewhere.
Not trying to speak for Gene, but I don't think he was talking about
tar vs. dump. I think he was pointing out that if your data is already
compressed, sending it a tape drive that was set up to do hardware
compression is not going to work well. Compressing compressed data
a second time usually ends up expanding it.
I use hardware compression for the reasons you mentioned -- it would kill
my systems to chew up that much CPU. But if you have a wide variety of
data (some file systems with lots of text that compresses really well,
and others with already compressed data), then using software compression
with Amanda has the major advantage that you can pick to compress or
not on a file system by file system basis.
>I'd like to know your points here. I have avoided tar, because earlier
>on when I did backups manually (i.e. without amanda) I had a few
>problems with tar (FreeBSD tar, v1.11.2) ...
Tar vs dump is a periodic war on this list. Rather than start that up
yet again :-), I suggest you do one of two things:
* Use what you're comfortable with regardless of what anybody else
says :-)
* Read through the archives for some of the pros and cons of both.
>Fernan
John R. Jackson, Technical Software Specialist, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
