dump

n. 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.

