Mike Noble wrote:
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
I have checked with members of the SAGE mailing list and several
have been using dump with Linux for the last couple of years.
Yes they have tested for disaster recover and it has worked fine.
One not is that dump will only work for ext2 and ext3 file systems.
XFS has xfsdump and xfsrestore. Do not know what Reiser has.
But as mentioned by someone on this thread already, do test your
backups every now and then to make sure that you can recover.
Mike
--
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Registered Linux User #362275 http://counter.li.org
