Well, it's not quite the same thing. You can't safely dump a live filesystem, making it unusable for me.
An explanation of the issue and why it not be an issue, depending on the situation:
<http://dump.sourceforge.net/isdumpdeprecated.html>
Also it's far less granular than an archiver like tar or dar.
It sounded like you were doing filesystem-level backups (including incrementals), not archives of isolated directory trees. Dump is very good for that.
Do you use any sparely allocated files? How is tar at handling those? Dump's restore will restore all the holes as holes, instead of allocating zero-filled disk blocks.
