How to backup root filesystem the correct way....

Kenneth Porter shiva at sewingwitch.com
Fri Dec 16 05:28:23 UTC 2005


--On Thursday, December 15, 2005 4:08 PM -0800 "Daniel B. Thurman" 
<dant at cdkkt.com> wrote:

> someone here told me that using
> dump/restore is not the preferred way and said that Torvald quoted
> that tar is better than D/R because it is not maintained nor current and
> may be fraught with failures.... and recommended that TAR be used.

dump is well-maintained. The mailing list has been quiet lately but I 
attribute that to a stable product. The maintainer answers questions quite 
quickly.

<http://dump.sourceforge.net/>

I use dump nightly to backup an FC2 box to a Win2003 server using Samba 
(smbfs). (The latter has the tape drive. But I may move the drive to the 
Linux box and reverse the backup relationship.)

An answer to Torvalds:

<http://dump.sourceforge.net/isdumpdeprecated.html>

The root filesystem should be quiet enough for dump. It's /var you need to 
worry about.

If your objective is a filesystem copy from a read-only source, using the 
rescue disk to boot from, as Steve Ringwald suggests, is a good idea. In 
addition to Steve's suggestions, you could use dump and restore in a 
pipeline.




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