GNU-tar vs dump(1)
Eric Gisin
egisin at mks.UUCP
Wed Jan 4 09:09:28 AEST 1989
One of the potential problems with using tar or cpio for backups
is that a sparse file (one with unallocated blocks)
that uses little disk space will use more space in the backup.
A sparse file can be created by a buggy program or by a user:
$ adb -w big
0t100000000?w0
^D
$ ls -ls big
24 -rw-r--r-- 1 egisin 100000004 Jan 3 17:59 big
This file uses 24K on the BSD filesytem, and about 100M in a tar backup.
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