Randy Kelsoe wrote:
Mike Noble wrote:
I just used dump to move the OS from one partition to another
one and it worked just fine. Now I will say that this was
done with Mandrake Linux dump, but dump should be the same
for either Mandrake, Fedora, debian....).
Mike
Here is what Linus said about dump back in April of 2001:
"...Note that dump simply won't work reliably at all even in 2.4.x: the
buffer cache and the page cache (where all the actual data is) are not
coherent. This is only going to get even worse in 2.5.x, when the
directories are moved into the page cache as well.
So anybody who depends on "dump" getting backups right is already playing
russian rulette with their backups. It's not at all guaranteed to get the
right results - you may end up having stale data in the buffer cache that
ends up being "backed up"......
Right now, the cpio/tar/xxx solutions are definitely the best ones, and
will work on multiple filesystems (another limitation of "dump"). Whatever
problems they have, they are still better than the _guaranteed_(*) data
corruptions of "dump".
However, it may be that in the long run it would be advantageous to have a
"filesystem maintenance interface" for doing things like backups and
defragmentation.."
Linus
That was 3 and a half years ago, so things may have changed. I would
hope so, since dump is still part of the distro.
I am glad that you mentioned this, I really do not know if
this has gotten better or not. I will have to look into this
further.
Mike
--
Usenix member http://www.usenix.org
Sage member http://www.sage.org
Registered Linux User #362275 http://counter.li.org
