dump, tar or pax?

[Dick Hoogendijk]

Up 'till now I used dump/restore to make a backup of my system.
Someone pointed out to me however that this was not the wisest thing to
do, given the fact that is is a level-0 dump so it needs to be restored
onto a clean (newfs) filesystem.

## dump -h0 -0f - /usr | ssh host "cat > /usr3/pooh/fbsd-usr.dump" 

I always thought having this backup was safe. Just make a minimal
install of FreeBSD ans restore the backup would be fine.
As I understand now, this is not the case, because the filesystem has to
be new for a restore (level-0) to work.

I'm told that instead of the dump/restore option it's better to use TAR
with a rule like:

## tar cvzfl - /usr | ssh host cat > destination

I understand that there will be problems with named pipes and device
nodes that are handled correctly by dump/restore and not by tar.
This should not be a problem, I'm told. Is this true?

Is dump/restore for a level-0 (system backup) not the wisest thing to
use and should I really consider using TAR? Is the calling argument
above the right one? Or should I use PAX? If so, with which options?

-- 
dick -- http://www.nagual.st/ -- PGP/GnuPG key: F86289CE
++ Running FreeBSD 4.8 ++ Debian GNU/Linux (Woody)
+ Nai tiruvantel ar vayuvantel i Valar tielyanna nu vilja