>>to backup and later 'tar x' to restore? Do I need the 'S' option
>>to handle sparse files 'more efficiently'?
>
>The `tar` program has become increasing able over the years, and may now be
>up to the job of handling all the possible complexities of backing up a
>filesystem, but beware that it really wasn't designed for this job, and may
>fail in subtle and hard to detect ways.

I'd like to add my $0.02c here:

- GNU tar is pretty good at handling most things now (hard links,
  special files, etc etc).

- Dump/restore has one _huge_ advantage over tar; it's a heck of a lot
  easier to restore only a few files with restore -i than it is with
  tar.  This may not matter for catostrophic restores, but it's
  wonderful for looking to see if this tape has that file you need
  (since the directory for dump files is stored in the beginning).

- Even though GNU tar can do multi-volume tars now, I think dump (after
  you figure out how to do the nutty calculations correctly, which
  we _should_ fix one of these days) does multi-volume backups better,
  since you can easily figure out which tape a file lives on (that's
  assuming you wrote down the inode ranges when you made your backup :-) ).

--Ken