On Sat, 26 Mar 2005 22:22, Volker Kuhlmann wrote: > > man find > > man cpio > > man gzip > > > > you can do it with tar, but imho cpio is _far_ more convenient. > > I would disagree. ;)
I have no problem with that. In many ways it's six of one and half-a-dozen of the other in many situations. The nice thing about cpio is that one has a great deal more choice about the mechanism by which you select which files you are going to back up. Also cpio has a built-in facility to store the archive file on a different machine. > cd /home > tar -czf /tmp/backup.tar.gz */Maildir > > Instead of the asterisk you can use a shell glob pattern to restrict to > certain users. Tar is always recursive and "hidden" is irrelevant. If > you're pressed for space, use bzip2 instead of gzip (change z to j). > bzip2's compresion rates are much better, but its CPU times can be > enormous. I would just like to point out that provided you have sufficient volume of backup medium you should eschew using the 'z' flag to compress the archive, because only one incorrect bit in the archive file has the effect of completely ruining your archive from that point to the end of the file. In practice you cannot get _any_ of the tail of the file back. OTOH if you save it uncompressed you can quite possibly recover everything including the crook sector which you will probably be able to correct using human intelligence. I'd go so far as to suggest that you should only use compression as an emergency while more backup capacity is being purchased. -- C. S.
