[clug] Hoary old chestnut: Use of 'dump'

[Stephen Granger]

IMHO Sounds like your mate is an oldschool Unix sysadmin who hasn't
figured out how to use rsync, (that's just what I've had to deal with in
the past)

It's a Russian roulette style of backup. We used it here for a while and
it worked fine. Redhat discourages the use of it going off Linus' statment
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-9-Manual/admin-primer/s1-disaster-rhlspec.html

I'm pretty sure dump only works with ext2/3 file systems and NOT with
reiserfs.

Why not try rsync, tar, gzip combination? or bacula, amanda, and the
rest which other people will suggest.

My favourite quote "Go forth and back up"

Stephen Jenkin wrote:
> I was talking to a mate about backups & when he said he used 'dump', I
> trotted out the "it's got a design flaw" line.
> 
> The real question was: How do I dump & restore with files on a remote
> host?
> A:
>      a) Use host:file or user at host:file syntax
>  AND b) set env. variable RSH to 'ssh' :-)
> 
> Afterwards, I poked around a little on the Net and found:
> http://dump.sourceforge.net/isdumpdeprecated.html
> 
> The authors of dump/restore say that backing up *any* live filesystem is
> fraught - not just 'dump' gets it wrong... 
> And that Linus' post in May 2001 was about a specific bug in the 2.4
> kernel (since fixed).
> 
> My question to the group:
>    Are the 'dump' authors still correct for ext2?
>    What about other popular filesystems, like reiserfs??
> 
> 
> cheers
> steve
> 
> 
> ---
> Steve Jenkin, Unix Sys Admin
> 0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915)
> PO Box 48, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA
> 
> sjenkin at canb.auug.org.au http://www.tip.net.au/~sjenkin
> 


-- 
Stephen Granger