> I also thought I'd try vbackup, but it really wants to run on an > unmounted disk.
Did it tell you this or are you reading its mind? I run vbackup on mounted disks all the time. You may not get data that is written during the backups, but quiescent data is preserved just fine. > Of course, Macs come with their standard setup as > one big partition with user files in the same partition as the system > files - no way to do a backup with vbackup. > How difficult would it be to get a vbackup image from the same kind > of walk as vac uses? You could just run vac instead if you don't care about having raw disk images. Vac has options to let you construct dump-like trees (or other arbitrary trees) from multiple vac files. > And lastly, what's the correct way to shut down venti? Will I lose > anything if I just eject (unmount) the drive? [This is specific to the p9p version of venti, not the standard Plan 9 one. Eventually this will apply to the standard Plan 9 one as well, but not yet.] You won't lose data, because vac and vbackup sync before writing to disk, but the next time you plug in the disk venti might take a while to start up. This is because venti knows it still needs to index the recently written data and does so. > I can force a flush > from the web server - do I need to do that each time or is there a > nice command line option somewhere? You need to flush - flushdcache, flushicache, flushdcache. Flushicache can take a long time. Russ
