e2image, ext3 and nightly backups.

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Sat, Mar 06, 2004 at 02:33:58AM +0100, Bodo Thiesen wrote:
> See above. In general e2image is no replace for e2fsck. If the filesystem 
> gets really such horribly broken, that e2fsck cannot repair it, than the 
> data captured via e2image can be used to rescue the files. But as that will 
> make available only files which are some days old, you shouldn't bother 
> about the journal at all. Think about it this way: In general you will 
> never need the output of e2image at all. So if it is only a little bit 
> incomplete (missing journal or something similar) it's not worth worrying 
> about at all.

It depends.  If your inode table gets completely trashed, the inode
table in the e2image file can give you a last-ditch chance to try to
recover certain critical files.  

Sure, it won't have files that were created after the e2image file was
created, but that's true of any backup.  If you're not doing regular
file backups, then e2image is a nice additional safety measure.  Of
course, you *should* be doing regular file backups, in which case
e2image isn't really necessary, unless you want to do e2image backups
more frequently than you are willing to do data backups.

						- Ted