SUMMARY: Backup while in multi-user mode

[Russell J Fulton;ccc032u]

zwicky at erg.sri.com (Elizabeth Zwicky) writes:

>Using tar instead of dump buys you extremely little. tar will skip
>active files, which means they won't corrupt your backup. This is its
>sole advantage, and its only an advantage over some versions of dump.
>It will *also* skip files with names that are too long; depending on
>the version of tar you are running, it may also exhibit various nasty
>other problems dump doesn't have. On the whole, dump is safer.

Would some knowledgable person care to comment on bru in light of Elizabeth's
comments above. We use bru to back up our SGI 4D/240S with 6GB disk (five
1.2 GB drives) We back up one drive a night and do an incremental on the
rest. The system is usually fairly quiet when the backup is done (in the
small hours) with only a small number of batch jobs active.

We have had no trouble, yet, and have had to restore a disk on two occasions
in the last year.

Cheers, Russell.

-- 
Russell Fulton, Computer Center, University of Auckland, New Zealand.
<rj_fulton at aukuni.ac.nz>