Remember that some that some things need to be explicitly dumped - eg databases and repositories because when you do restore, you might want to restore to an upgraded OS version.
Rather than use dump, I use gtar - I have restored stuff after 30 years with gtar, to completely different OSes - eg OS/2 to OBSD! * If you do GFS (four tapes: grandfather, father, son, and NEXT), each tape is approximately used once per month, and can be expected to have quite a long life. The "Son" tape is kept near the drive, the "father" tape goes off-site. You tape from the disk backup (done with rsync) machine - databases and repositories can have hot standbys on the same machine. In case of disaster recovery, step 1 is to duplicate the "father" tape off site. Then you still have a chance of knowing how bad things are before you accidentally overwrite the "son". Once a year, you can put one father tape aside for archive, and replace with a fresh tape. Possibly twice a year - to maintain a second, completely separate, archive. If you don't use tapes, expect to lose data one day. I am probably the only person to have restored data from VMS to BBC Micro using 1600BPI reel to reel tapes. (Probably the only person to have a BBC micro with both reel-to-reel tape and ST506 interfaces). Andrew * ICL George 2 to VMS only worked with no compression, and George 2 to Cray :-) required an assembler program to convert between the two different the 6-bit ASCII character sets on 7-track 556 bpi tapes.
