At Wed, 22 Apr 2009 16:51:33 -0700 (PDT) CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:
Robert Heller wrote:
Note that is also possible to use dump or cpio as well. Unlike the MS-Windows zip/unzip, which combines compressing and archiving in a single program, the 'UNIX' way is to separate these functions. bzip2 only compresses. Other programs (tar, dump, cpio) create archives -- bundle a group of files and/or directory trees into a single file.
zip and some of the other compression tools also have a habbit of not preserving file system permissions or ownership, which can be handy in a backup, also may not support special devices(e.g. sockets, fifos, character/block device entries etc). If you rely upon file system ACLs on top of regular unix permissions things might get more complicated, I don't use ACLs, so don't have experience with preserving them in archives.
dump and *GNU* tar handle special files properly. dump preserves all ext2/ext3 permissions, etc. Also preserves hard and soft links.
nate
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