From: "John Foust" <jfoust at threedee.com> There's plenty of file system meta-data out there to confound this process. Blindly archiving and un-archiving will destroy data that's not inside the file. There's a lot to be said for archiving images of entire filesystems. What, timestamps aren't important? Creation dates as well as last-modified dates? Archive bits? At least 'tar' preserves Unix's groups and permissions to a reasonable degree.