Tar or Dump/Restore?

[Doug Brinkman - DRI CMA]

We have about 250 GB of Oracle/SAP data in filesystems that needs to be moved from a dev server to production. Due to logistics, we need to copy the data to tape to accomplish this.

Which method would you use to do this, Dump/Restore or tar?

Thanks,
Ed

[A. Clay Stephenson]

First of all, if you have any single file that exceeds 8GiB (or 2GB, unpatched) tar cannot handle the job. In HP-UX land, the utility of choice (and it's performance is quite good) is fbackup/frecover. Man fbackup/frecover for details.

[Ivan Ferreira]

For small data you can use tar.

For large data like this, you should use fbackup/frecover (At least, that is what I would use).

[Fabian Briseño]

A. clay and ivan are correct tar only holds 8gb of info, trust me I know this by experience

and i agree with ivan fbackup is the best way to go on this

[Florian Heigl (new acc)]

I would prefer fbackup over both of them as long we're talking about HP-UX at both ends.

[Doug Brinkman - DRI CMA]

Thanks guys. I forgot one small but important detail: The OS is Linux. I wish it had a nice native utility like fbackup, but no.

I'll have to check on the max file size thing, that will definately determine how this goes.

Thanks again,
Ed

[Rick Garland]

GNU tar is a good choice. Lots of options available to alert you to potential problems.

dump/restore would next choice