[Gllug] couple of quick questions (USB stick and backups)

salsaman salsaman at xs4all.nl
Sat Mar 25 18:49:21 UTC 2006


Mike Brodbelt wrote:

>Richard Jones wrote:
>  
>
>>On Sat, Mar 25, 2006 at 07:00:08AM +0100, salsaman wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>That's OK. I found the "dump" command. First you edit /etc/fstab, and in 
>>>the fifth field you set either a 1 (dump) or 0 (no dump).
>>>Then dump will exclude the filesystems marked with a 0.
>>>      
>>>
>>I think 'dump' is great. ...  Unfortunately Linus disagrees
>>(http://lwn.net/2001/0503/a/lt-dump.php3) and he probably knows what
>>he's talking about.  It's not possible to dump an ext2/3 filesystem
>>without getting data corruption, unless the filesystem is entirely
>>unmounted, in which case you might as well be using another backup
>>method.
>>    
>>
>
>Backing up mounted filesystems with dump has been an ongoing sore point
>for a long time. In practice, you'll get away with it the vast majority
>of the time, but I'd question whether that's a good attitude to take for
>backups.
>
>If you want to use dump, (as I do), then you need to use a filesystem
>that can guarantee reliable dumps - XFS does this, and I think the
>existence of xfsdump/xfsrestore is a goog reason to use it. Pretty much
>all my backups get done with xfsdump.
>
>Mike
>
>  
>

Well, the instructions I read said to first go into single user mode:

init 1; exit

so I did this. At that runlevel hardly anything was running.

The only corruption I could get would be in log files and the like, and 
for my purposes that is not really a problem.

Gabriel.

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