FSArchiver reduces cognitive load by guaranteeing that resulting archive is accurate and exact mirror of original filesystem. AFAIK, cpio does not support extended attributes and one have to remember to call tar with specific flags to store xattr.
"by guaranteeing that resulting archive is accurate and exact mirror of original filesystem."
^^^ that is true enough
"reduces cognitive load"
^^^ that I have doubts about. I expect this would be highly variable between people, which leads to my question about the trade-off.
For those who are newcomers (say ten years or fewer) to the *nix world, it may well be an improvement. For those who have been using the standard-ish tools for 30+ years, learning yet-another-new-utility has a very high cost.
That dilemma would be irrelevant if the person taking backups is the same person doing the restoration (as will often be the case). My concern is along the lines of "what if this becomes a de facto standard?"
