Other Archivers

Although tar is the most common archiver on Linux systems, there are two other important systems called dump/restore and cpio that you should be aware of. The following sections provide an overview of the most important archiver operations, but they do not go into very much detail.

Dump and Restore

The dump/restore system is a throwback to the older days of Unix. Unlike most other archivers, the dump program looks at the internal structure of a filesystem, and therefore it only supports certain filesystem types. On Linux, this list currently includes only the ext2 and ext3 filesystems, and this is unlikely to change, because there is little interest in porting the system to the myriad other filesystems. This inflexibility makes dump/restore ...

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