dump(8)
Period. Elizabeth D. Zwicky
torture tested all the backup programs discussed here. The clear
choice for preserving all your data and all the peculiarities of
Unix filesystems is dump(8)
. Elizabeth created
filesystems containing a large variety of unusual conditions (and
some not so unusual ones) and tested each program by do a backup
and restore of that filesystems. The peculiarities included:
files with holes, files with holes and a block of nulls, files
with funny characters in their names, unreadable and unwritable
files, devices, files that change size during the backup, files
that are created/deleted during the backup and more. She
presented the results at LISA V in Oct. 1991. See
torture-testing Backup and Archive Programs.