Comparing tar, cpio, and dump
A few years ago, John Pezzano from Hewlett-Packard did a paper comparing native backup products. It is the best one that I have seen, so I asked his permission to update it and include it in this book. It is Table 3-5.
Table 3-5. Conversion of Native Utilities
Feature |
tar |
cpio |
dump |
---|---|---|---|
Simplicity of invocation |
Very simple (tar c
|
Needs find to specify filenames |
Simple—few options |
Recovery from I/O errors |
None—write your own utility |
Resync option on HP-UX will cause some data loss |
Automatically skips over bad section |
Back up special files |
Later revisions |
Yes |
Yes |
Multivolume backup |
Later revisions |
Yes |
Yes |
Back up across network |
Using rsh only |
Using rsh only |
Yes |
Append files to backup |
Yes (tar -r) |
No |
No |
Multiple independent backups on single tape |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Ease of listing files on the volume |
Difficult—must search entire backup (tar -t) |
Difficult—must search entire backup (cpio -it) |
Simple—index at front (restore -t) |
Ease and speed of finding a particular file |
Difficult—no wildcards, must search entire volume |
Moderate—wildcards, must search entire volume |
Interactive—very easy with commands like cd, ls |
Incremental backup |
No |
Must use find to locate new/modified files |
Incremental of whole filesystem only, multiple levels |
List files as they are being backed up |
tar cvf 2>
|
cpio -v 2>
|
Only after backup with restore -t
>
( |
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