Also Sprach Greg A. Woods: > There's nothing "religious" about it, at least not since Elizabeth > Zwicky published her study of the reliability and capabilities of > various backup programs..... > > Elizabeth Zwicky, "Torture-testing Backup and Archive Programs: > Things You Ought to Know But Probably Would Rather Not," LISA V > proceedings, San Diego, 1991, pp. 181-185. >
Note the date: 1991. Some things have changed then, like the introduction of journaled filesystems, snapshotting, ACLs, and so on. It's still worth reading but please look at the version numbers of the utilities under review. I'd welcome any references to a more recent review on the same topic. > As for Linux brain damage, well, that's not very "religious" either. > Dump is broken for mounted filesystems and Linux 2.4 kernels -- end of > story. Unmount your filesystems before backing them up, and go single > user and cross your fingers to backup your root filesystems! > More precisely dump for ext2/ext3 on Linux 2.4 kernels up to 2.4.11; current "stable" release is 2.4.18. Supposedly dump for ext2 no longer suffers from the same buffer cache problem in later kernels, though I haven't had the courage to verify it. The only other dump util on Linux is xfsdump for the SGI XFS filesystem and that never suffered from the same problem. Unmounting or otherwise quiescing a file system is usually a good idea before using a block level util like dump on any *nix, not just Linux. I think whether to use GNU tar on / depends on what's in /. If it's kept pretty lean (/usr, /home, /var on separate partitions) then I don't think it's a problem. If / has a lot of non-system stuff below it, such as I've seen on single or few user workstations, then you may run into problems with restoring ACLs and other stuff GNU tar can't handle. > -- > Greg A. Woods > > +1 416 218-0098; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Planix, Inc. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; VE3TCP; Secrets of the Weird <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > ---- C. Chan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> GPG Public Key registered at pgp.mit.edu "Your Pithy Aphorism Here!" Or finger [EMAIL PROTECTED]
