On Monday 24 July 2006 16:06, Dominic Coulombe wrote: > in *theory* you can do live backup of machines with journaled filesystems > (at least ext3) without any problem. > > Linux will repair filesystems from journal after recovering your backups.
No, that does not work, because the journal is backed up as well. The journal on the backup might be several minutes older that the real journal of the file system. So the journal replay might even destroy the file system because it does not reflect the current state of the disk in any way. The only way this *might* work is to shut down all I/O on the file system completely (sync and remount r/o for example). But this approach has several downsides. (e.g. some daemons really want to write to disk from time to time and dont like errors during write) I strongly second Alans and Davids statements: Unless your Linux systems *are completely down* at the time of backup, full volume dumps from outside the Linux system are more than likely to be useless and journaling does not help here. -- Mit freundlichen Grüßen / Best Regards Christian Borntraeger Linux Software Engineer zSeries Linux & Virtualization ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
