Tape backups and Disk management

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <9782 at batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> rogerj at tcgould.tn.cornell.edu (Roger Jagoda) writes:
-Now, the same problem exists under UNIX, but with
-DOS systems I have my choice of 6 or 7 GOOD disk managers/defragmentors.
-Under UNIX, there doesn't seem to be ANYTHING ...

dump; mkfs; restore

(or equivalent)

-BTW, what does "dd" do so well that people
-tell me I should use that for tape backup instead? The man page clearly
-shows it for a file conversion utility, such as EBSIDIC to ASCII. Why
-would I want to use this in tape backups?

"dd" is not an archiver at all!  However, it does give you control
over I/O blocking, which is significant for magtape.