Tared by TAR

[Alex Zbyslaw]

Bob wrote:

>I went nuts, and got tar'ed and feathered with TAR. I have always used tar 
>with the -M option (--multi-volume) which allows you to span more than one 
>tape on a big ta archiver;  but you won't find this -M option in BSD's TAR! 
>Nor will you find a proper man page, for BSD's port of gtar (gnutar) which I 
>THIINK is equivalent to Linux's tar. 
>  
>
The manual page for gtar on FreeBSD 5.4 is about 30% longer than the one 
on a random Linux system I looked at, and looks like a proper man page 
to me.  It mentions -M.  Linux tar *is* gtar, though the specific 
version will of course vary between different Linuxes and different 
FreeBSDs.

That aside, try "info tar" for full blown gory details of gnu tar.

Also, for incremental backups, dump is easy to use, handles multi-tape 
archives and incrementals, and works on Live filesystems; but it does 
only work at the level of a filesystem not random directories.

--Alex