Re: [PLUG] Backup to CD-RW

["Gregson Helledy" <gregsonh@gra-inc.com>]

According to a book I once read, cpio is better than GNU tar.
I've forgotten the book's reasoning, but I'm using cpio to make 
backups on my dialup gateway/printserver/fileserver.

Without starting a vi/emacs-style war, is there any real advantage
of one over the other for small (~500MB) backups?

Greg


=======================
gabriel rosenkoetter wrote:

Presuming you don't mean that you've written your own implementation
of tar(1), then you're using some GNU/Linux with its default tar;
that's (probably) GNU tar[1]. I don't know precisely to what the
author's referring by suggesting that "tar's not very good with
compression". Perhaps he just means that GNU tar's performance
sucks when using zlib (which is probably actually zlib's fault).

In general though, GNU tar's performance DOES suck. On a piece of
hardware I use frequently (an Exabyte EZ17 Mammoth2 tape loader[2]),
GNU tar averages 12-15 MB/s and Schily tar averages 25 MB/s or so.
What's more, GNU tar does certain things just flat-out wrong. See
ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/star/alpha/STARvsGNUTAR for more on that.

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