Gene Heskett wrote:
Well, tar is file based, and its recovery can be to an already
occupied directory. Dump does the disk structure (AIUI) so that the
recovered stuff goes back to the same place on the disk (if I've got
it right that is, corrections welcome)
Files from backups made with dump can also be restored to any point in
the filesystem. I'm using dump with Amanda on my FreeBSD machinery and
I've done this many times.
The actual reasons why one might prefer tar to dump are that tar is
cross-platform (you can restore files tar'ed from FreeBSD machine to a
Linux machine, for example, which you can't do with dump) and tar allows
you to make backups of arbitrary (sub-)directory trees instead of
entire filesystems.
--
Toomas Aas
