Be aware that although bru is available on a variety of UNIX systems, it is not as widely used as the other backup utilities. At a site that has workstations from a variety of vendors, not all of which provide bru, you may wish to use one of the other IRIX backup utilities for consistency. tar is the most widely accepted format. Refer to Table 1-1 for an overview of various backup utilities including bru. If your site has predominately IRIX workstations, and you don't need to move filesystem backups between different brands of computers, bru is probably a good choice.
Note that the System Manager backup menu uses the Backup interface to bru to back up workstations. If a bru backup is made that requires more than one tape, bru stops and prompts you to insert another tape before it continues.