On Oct 11, 2007, at 5:01 AM, Sean Zimmermann wrote:
If I ignored the indexing issue (since most of my work with tar is large, non-incremental backups where I typically restore the entire contents -it would be nice if there was indexing, but is not a huge problem), should I still use something other than tar?
The answer is a resounding "maybe." cpio has some advantages over tar when doing compressed backups. It compresses each file individually, instead of compressing the entire archive. This makes a big difference for data recovery. If part of a compressed tar archive gets corrupted, you'll probably lose the whole thing. If part of a compressed cpio archive gets corrupted, you'll lose only the individual files affected by the corruption. This was probably more of a concern back in the days when we all backed up to tape, but bad hard disk sectors and scratched DVD-Rs do happen.
cpio has a really horrid command line syntax, though. ;)