system backup

[Peter L. Peres]

On Tue, 17 Aug 2004, Lennart Sorensen wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 16, 2004 at 10:35:17PM -0400, Peter L. Peres wrote:
>> Normally you want to do something like that using cpio, and not tar. You
>> can prepare a filelist using find / -prune /dev -a etc etc to remove
>> unpalatable things from the archive.
>
> Not if it's a tar file you are trying to create.
>
> I use afio for backups, but I never have understood the point of cpio.
> What does it do that rsync doesn't do for me?

cpio is clever about device files and such. You can copy the devices as 
is, or links to same wherever they are in the fs without trouble. rpm uses 
cpio internally among others. Other than that, nothing special. But I 
still prefer to use find and make a file-list (equivalent to ls -lR but 
better) and then have a peek at it before using it as file list for the 
backup or system transfer.

Peter
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