Re: [PLUG] Suicide linux

[Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>]

On Thu, Aug 29, 2013 at 10:07 AM, Gavin W. Burris <bug@wharton.upenn.edu> wrote:
> Nice.  Check these one out.  Anyone still using tar for its intended
> purpose, you know, Tape ARchives?
>

Indeed - if you're using it for anything else dar is probably a better
tool, but for tar's ubiquity.

In my travails with backup solutions I did discover one flaw with dar
though: it builds an index in-memory exclusively so as the number of
files increases so does RAM use (regardless of actual final archive
size).  If you want to use dar to back up an entire filesystem that
can be problematic, especially for directories containing numerous
small files.

Tar maintains no index at all, and duplicity stores the index in a
separate file anyway and can use tmp space.

Once upon a time I did use tar with /dev/rmt, or one on another system
(I think tar supports remote tape drives natively with an scp-like
syntax).

Rich
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