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.