Linux Backup Administration

[Les Mikesell]

On Sat, 2005-07-02 at 10:08, Kenneth Porter wrote:

> Oh? Dump records the files contiguously, so there's no need for any 
> structures beyond the metadata in the inode (those same pesky things that 
> tar saves). dump also handles sparse files (the gigantic ones that have no 
> actual space allocated) correctly. (It may be that tar does that as well. I 
> haven't checked recently.)

Gnutar handles them.

>  dump accesses the raw disk, so it can back up 
> files hidden by mount points. 

I think I remember seeing Linus say that the raw disk as seen by dump
can be out of sync with the filesystem cache as seen by things reading
and writing files.  Is that still true?

> (OTOH, restore reads through the filesystem, 
> so it can't verify files hidden by mount points.) The latest dump backs up 
> extended attributes. Does tar do that?

Star is supposed to do extended attributes, I don't thing gnutar does.
However, you can extract files from tar/cpio archives onto just about
any operating system and filesystem.  With dump you can only put back
the same filesystem type you dumped.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com