I just thought of a related question. How reliable is the 'sync' command for obtaining file system consistency prior to a physical disk backup? If a file system absolutely cannot be unmounted due to use by a running application, but the application itself has a reliable 'quiesce' capability, will the filesystem be relatively clean immediately after a sync?
Obviously, being in single user mode is a good idea, also. As a reference point, on our test systems we had no problem making physical minidisk copies after a sync, but our test systems don't really run much real work. Scott Ledbetter StorageTek
