On Mon, Nov 26, 2001 at 07:58:54PM +0700, Robert Elz wrote:
[...] 
> Actually, dump is perfect for this task - dump makes backups, it is the
> only real tool dedicated to that purpose, it is almost certainly what you
> should be using (rsync as suggested is another possibility, with slightly

Thank you very much; this and the replies yesterday where great!

While on this "backup" topic, maybe I can get your advice on an easy
way to make backups over a lan (tcp/ip) to other machines.

My situation is that practically all of my hardware is either from
dumpsters or junkshops.  Some of my harddisks have 10% or more of the
disk sequestered off because of bad sectors, others make funny noises.
In addition, the disks are seldom more than 1GB in size.  I like to
keep backups on entirely different machines, and just switch boxes if
one should give out for any reason (and there are lots of reasons).

What I've been doing is making tarballs of directories and then ftping
them to another machine.  This is a bit clumsy, and also means you have
to have at least enough space to temporarily make the tarball.  What I
found convenient with Windows (I hear the booing already :) was Ipswitch's
WS_FTP that would transfer whole directories and subdirectories.  In
fact I liked it so much that when I still had a good Windows machine, I'd
transfer whole directories to it and then transfer them again to another
NetBSD machine, a kind of relay strategy.

So the question out of all this is,

WHAT'S THE BEST WAY TO RECURSIVELY TRANSFER WHOLE DIRECTORIES AND THEIR
SUBDIRECTORIES OVER A LAN?

Is it possible to do some kind of compression on the fly and then maybe even
decompress at the other end?  Schematically, something like:
   Machine 1                    lan               Machine 2
% tar cf - . >> bzip2 > ftp ...............  > bzip2 -dc | tar xf -