backups

Russell Coker russell at coker.com.au
Mon Sep 20 14:09:25 UTC 2004


On Mon, 20 Sep 2004 11:48, Colin Walters <walters at redhat.com> wrote:
> > Are these all features of ext3? If so, wouldn't dump do the job?
>
> Well, it's not quite the same thing.  You can't safely dump a live
> filesystem, making it unusable for me.  Also it's far less granular than
> an archiver like tar or dar.

LVM snapshots will allow dump to be used on live file systems.

Dump does not work across file systems, so if you want to convert an Ext3 file 
system to ReiserFS or XFS then dump will not help.

Dump is tied to Inode numbers and I believe that this has some implications 
for restoring deleted files if the machine has continued operation and 
created other files with the same Inode numbers.

We do need a better backup solution, a friend investigated backups some time 
ago (without regard to SE Linux) and reached the conclusion that extending 
"dar" offered the best promise of all the Linux backup options.  So dar may 
be worth considering.

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