> Donald Lee wrote:

>If you want to restore a drive, I would suggest that you consider
>using dump/restore rather than tar.  tar has some quirks, like

That wouldn't allow him to "drop in" a base.tgz in place
of the standard base.tgz and use the installer "out of the box"...

>device files, empty directories, and permissions that make it
>not a good match for "imaging".  dump/restore, although balky,
>are built specifically for this task.


Huh??  What am I missing?  I use tar all the time to build
my backups...
 
# cd /dev
# mkdir emptydir
# touch emptyfile
# tar cpf XXX *
# tar tvpf XXX	

-r-xr-xr-x root/wheel    12597 Aug 23 04:45 2001 MAKEDEV
-r-xr-xr-x root/wheel     2100 Aug 23 04:45 2001 MAKEDEV.local
lrwx------ root/wheel        0 Sep 25 19:01 2001 apm -> tctrl0
^ symlink preserved (not followed)

crw-r--r-- root/wheel     71,8 Sep 25 19:01 2001 apmctl
^ character device

crw-rw-rw- root/wheel   69,128 Sep 25 19:00 2001 audio
crw-rw-rw- root/wheel   69,128 Sep 25 19:00 2001 audio0
crw-rw-rw- root/wheel   69,129 Sep 25 19:00 2001 audio1

[snip]

crw------- uucp/wheel     12,3 Sep 25 18:59 2001 dtyd
^^^^^^^^^^ preserved permissions

crw-r----- root/kmem      3,11 Sep 25 18:59 2001 eeprom
           ^^^^^^^^^ preserved owner/group

drwxr-xr-x root/wheel        0 Jan  2 09:20 2002 emptydir/
^ *empty* directory

-rw-r--r-- root/wheel        0 Jan  2 09:23 2002 emptyfile
^ *empty* file

crw-rw---- root/operator  18,3 Sep 25 19:00 2001 enrst0
crw-rw---- root/operator 18,19 Sep 25 19:00 2001 enrst1
brw-rw---- root/operator  11,3 Sep 25 19:00 2001 enst0
^ block device

brw-rw---- root/operator 11,19 Sep 25 19:00 2001 enst1
crw-rw---- root/operator  18,2 Sep 25 19:00 2001 erst0
crw-rw---- root/operator 18,18 Sep 25 19:00 2001 erst1
brw-rw---- root/operator  11,2 Sep 25 19:00 2001 est0
brw-rw---- root/operator 11,18 Sep 25 19:00 2001 est1
crw-rw-rw- root/wheel     22,0 Sep 25 18:59 2001 fb
drwxr-xr-x root/wheel        0 Jan  2 09:21 2002 fd/
crw-rw-rw- root/wheel     24,0 Sep 25 18:59 2001 fd/0
crw-rw-rw- root/wheel     24,1 Sep 25 18:59 2001 fd/1

[snip]

AFAIK, the only problems are (were?) named pipes and/or
sockets being recreated as plain files (though that usually
isn't a problem next time the program that created them starts
up and erases/recreates them...)

Are there some subtleties that I am not aware of here?

I *do* know that tar isn't always tar (varieties).
But, given that he isn't trying to move the tarball
from machine/OS 1 to machine/OS 2, I don't see the
problem... (?)

--don