On Oct 11, 2007, at 5:01 AM, Sean Zimmermann wrote:
If I ignored the indexing issue (since most of my work with tar is
large,
non-incremental backups where I typically restore the entire
contents -
it would be nice if there was indexing, but is not a huge problem),
should I still use something other than tar?
The answer is a resounding "maybe." cpio has some advantages over
tar when doing compressed backups. It compresses each file
individually, instead of compressing the entire archive. This makes
a big difference for data recovery. If part of a compressed tar
archive gets corrupted, you'll probably lose the whole thing. If
part of a compressed cpio archive gets corrupted, you'll lose only
the individual files affected by the corruption. This was probably
more of a concern back in the days when we all backed up to tape, but
bad hard disk sectors and scratched DVD-Rs do happen.
cpio has a really horrid command line syntax, though. ;)
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