Justin, Thanks for the offer. Please post, or send me the documentation on how to. 'preciate it. Ferg' -----Original Message----- From: fedora-list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx [mailto:fedora-list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Justin W Sent: Monday, July 02, 2007 9:03 PM To: For users of Fedora Subject: Re: RAID gotchas! Roberto Ragusa wrote: > Jeffrey Ross wrote: > >> Roberto Ragusa wrote: >> >>> Dump is considered a bad choice by Linus himself; read this: >>> >>> http://lwn.net/2001/0503/a/lt-dump.php3 >>> >>> (a few years ago, but the words are quite strong) >>> >>> Best regards. >>> >>> >> I've read the arguments here's the rebuttal to the 2001 message: >> http://dump.sourceforge.net/isdumpdeprecated.html >> > > Thank you for this link, very interesting. > Basically thay say that there was a bug in 2.4, now fixed. > > They claim three advantages when using dump, but they are rather weak, > I have to say (IMHO). > > 1) dump unmounted filesystem; but why not just mount it read-only and > use a normal file copy tool? they talk about trying to dump corrupted > unmountable filesystems for rescue purposes, but it looks like a very > stretched motivation, especially when trying to prove that dump is > preferable for normal uncorrupted filesystems. > > For less informed readers (or curious readers later finding this thread in a search of the archives), copying unmountable file systems is already possible: use dd. You can even take the image of a partition (or a whole drive) and mount the file system located within it using loop devices (though the whole drive takes more work aligning the mount to the beginning of a "partition", and thus, an understandable file system). > [snip] > > 6) dump can not create accessible backups; I want to be able to use > the files in my backup (find, grep,...), not just restore them. > > Using the method I describe above, this is possible. > Finally they say that by using snapshots you can have a stable > read-only image of the filesystem to run dump on. But the same is true > for other tools too. > > I just backed up my server using a combination of an LVM snapshot, dd to copy the partition initially, and now it'll be maintained with nightly rsyncs to a mounted image file. (Note: If anyone is interested, I can post some documentation describing how I set up the backup and the script which will keep my backup up-to-date). > Certainly there is not a right way and wrong way to do things. > If dump gives you reliable backups and you are used to it, it's a > valid choice. > > File copy tools will remain my preferred choice. > In this exact moment I have two backups running across the LAN; they > involve a couple of millions of files; one is using tar|tar, another > rsync. (I'm not kidding) All filesystems are reiser here, so I > couldn't try dump if I wanted, but even if I could, I think I would > not. :-) > > You gave me an opportunity to understand dump better. > For what I've seen, it should be called e2dump and should be part of > ext2progs, together with e2fsck, e2label, resize2fs and dumpe2fs > (which is something else). > It is a filesystem tool, not a file tool. > Linux is not always ext2/ext3. > > Maybe the summary of all this is just that dump is a tool to backup a > filesystem, but I want to backup the files. > > Best regards. > Justin W -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
