[In case you weren't aware: GNU tar handles sparse files!]
True, but you're talking about the opposite case. The complaint was
that GNU tar can't tell when a file has blocks allocated all-zero,
i.e. is denser than it need be. My question is: why does *that*
matter? It will not look for holes (last I checked) in a file that
has no holes, so the argument that some files have to be 100%
allocated doesn't matter...
> > I would argue that dump can't deal with *ANY* file perfectly, since it
> > (in the typical configuration) is committing the utter no-no of
> > reading a non-quiescent r/w mounted filesystem from the raw block
> > device.
>
> At least it's *tries* to handle them, which is more than I would claim
> tar/cpio et al tries to do :-) Yes, another approach would be better, but
> there are lots of cases where tar/cpio isn't anywhere near enough.
>
> There *are* reasons why commercial UNIX backup systems doesn't usually use
> the 'read the raw-device' approach (one of them is the porting nightmare),
> but on the other hand the one's I know of does handle sparse files, it's
> really a necessity for serious backups.
>
> Wonder what it would take to make Legato (Networker) or Spectra Logic
> (Alexandria) to create a backup client for Linux. Both support SCO after
> all. The best would be to get them to port the Server too, but that might
> be considerably harder :-)
Legato *has* a Linux client, although it is unsupported. Of course,
we had to abandon Legato here because of repeated, severe failures
that Legato refused to give us competent help with.
-hpa
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