On Wednesday 01 January 2003 12:58, Kirk Strauser wrote: >I'm using Amanda on a mixed network of Linux and FreeBSD machines. > The default installation of Amanda on FreeBSD defines > --with-user=operator and --with-group=operator . It occurs to me > that I have many files that aren't world-readable. Can tar > backup these files? Wouldn't it be running as operator and not > root? > Theoreticly when amanda is running tar, its running it suid root. I once thought that was suffucient until I needed to recover, and discovered I had no index files in the backups, tar refuses to backup a file with a lock on it. That seems to mean that anything that happens to be running when amanda runs will not be archived because that file will have a lock on it, so there is going to be some missing stuff. Its probably not a showstopper because you'll have the srcs or rpms to re-install those available during the recovery, but it is more work. But in the case if the config and data dirs amanda maintains, to discover at recovery time after a crash that you don't have any index data, that was also a showstopper.
So now I wait till all the other disklist entries are done, turn off the indexing, and then grab the index and config stuffs so they are the last 2 files on the tape, and they are uptodate except for their own entries. That seems to work ok, but now being a bit paranoid after having been snakebit once, I also tar those dirs and store them someplace else on a different disk. I wrote a script to manage that maintainance chore also. >My disk devices are owned by operator, so using dump instead of > tar should catch everything, but I'd been persuaded that dump is > bad for backing up live filesystems on Linux and FreeBSD. Have I > migrated away from that utility at the expense of skipping the > non-world-readble files on my system, many of which are the most > important files on my network? -- Cheers, Gene AMD K6-III@500mhz 320M Athlon1600XP@1400mhz 512M 99.21% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
