Linux Backup Administration

[Kenneth Porter]

--On Saturday, July 02, 2005 4:37 PM -0500 Les Mikesell 
<lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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?

Here's the full scoop:

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

> 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.

restore, the counterpart to dump, only uses normal filesystem API's, not 
raw device I/O, so it can restore to any filesystem. Some information may 
be lost if the target filesystem doesn't support all the features of the 
dumped ext3 system, but that's not the fault of dump/restore nor ext3.