According to Jonathan Marsden:
>
>then generates the dumptocs for each of the partitions dumped on
>that particular tape.
>

Actually - you probably want to look for a tool called lldump which
gives you a "long" listing of the dump, complete with file modes and
the like.  This can be very handy for the occaisions where dump
botches the setting of directory permissions which can happen with a
flakey tape.

>According to the sysadmin bible (Unix System Administration Handbok,
>by Nemeth, Snyder, Seebass and Hein), tar does not read or write
>device files, expands holes, and is intolerant of tape errors.  I
>don't know if the GNU tar reliably overcomes those limitations.
>

The nice thing about dump is that you can restore the entire system
from tape.  No fuss no bother - with traditional tar it is a bit more
manual.

Also, if you are doing a restore of a small number of files dump doesn't
need to read the entire tape to make sure it got them.  This can make
the restores much quicker.

-- 
Brett Lymn, Computer Systems Administrator, AWA Defence Industries
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  "Upgrading your memory gives you MORE RAM!" - ad in MacWAREHOUSE catalogue.