[MonetDB-users] dump and restore---use merovingian database files?

I just had to restore a database dump, and I got nervous watching top. The box, which doesn't have much RAM, started to swap on the restore. At times, the monetdb process was using over 90% of available RAM. While I only have 500M RAM, the database only has 10m records. The gzipped dump is 142MB. Other than the backup/restore issue, Monet seems quite happy running with this much data and so little RAM. It looks like it could support much more data---but I'm not so sure the restore will. If I run $ monetdb stop -a can I safely tar the database files and use that as a backup? Or do I need to stop merovingian too? Or is this approach not safe? Thanks, Mark