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Dump is the method of choice on this end.  

The disadvantage of dump though is that it can be rather stupid on tape
length and then you have to punch in the tape size manually.  However,
when it comes to repairing a trashed partion there's no better method that
I know of.  Tar doesn't catch everything like dump so I'd advise against
tar.  Dump does is better and if you need compression there still are
little dirty methods of making it work with gzip (haven't had the
time/want to bother getting it fully working though with my TR-4 tape
drive).

- -------------------------------------------------------------------------
Geoff Gowey			| NetBSD: the best multi-platform OS 
steplogic(at)geocities.com	| www.netbsd.org
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On Thu, 27 Aug 1998, Anders Dinsen wrote:

* ->Suffering from a recent disk crash, I'm investigating methods to
* ->backup my NetBSD boxes (I currently run two, one at home and one at
* ->work).
* ->
* ->I don't want to backup everything; although it enables me to recover
* ->quite quickly from a crash, it does'nt allow me to use the backup for
* ->upgrading packages and netbsd. Plus, installing NetBSD from scratch is
* ->really easy.
* ->
* ->So I would prefer a backup script that backs up all the important
* ->configuration files that I have set up, plus my user data (home
* ->directories, /usr/local etc).
* ->
* ->I am building a list of configuration files, directories to backup, so
* ->that I'm able to make a tar-archive of that on a regular basis. I
* ->would also dump a list of packages I've installed (using pkg_info). 
* ->
* ->That way, it's easy to upgrade a package, since I would just uninstall
* ->it, install the new version, and grab my configuration from my backup.
* ->The same applies when I decide to upgrade NetBSD entirely.
* ->
* ->So, what are you NetBSD users' experiences? Do you just dump(8) your
* ->file systems as described, do you tar(1) the entire system from /, or
* ->do you use a scheme better than the one I'm here proposing? E.g. RCS
* ->or CVS control configuration files?
* ->
* ->Anders

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