1. An undigested and voluminous mass of information about a problem
or the state of a system, especially one routed to the slowest
available output device (compare {core dump}), and most especially
one consisting of hex or octal {runes} describing the byte-by-byte
state of memory, mass storage, or some file. In {elder days},
debugging was generally done by groveling over a dump (see {grovel});
increasing use of high-level languages and interactive debuggers has
made such tedium uncommon, and the term dump now has a faintly
archaic flavor.
2. A backup. This usage is typical only at large timesharing
installations.
[glossary]