On 9/16/22 14:07, Bill Cunningham wrote:
Some time back I asked for opinions on backups. I had a lot of good opinions. I tried to backup some directories with dump. Which seemed to me to be quick and for what I was altogether looking for, for ext 2/3, pretty good. A 16GB filesystem was copied to a level 0 dump at around 1.5 GB. So it seems.
I have several favorites, but in regards to dump, for those that are familiar with it; I did a level 0 dump and before I try restoring an erased partition I though I would clean up a few questions.
As far at the partition's bootsector, would that happen to be in the dump file? And I am pretty sure partition table entries or any of the MBR are not saved. Timestamps and uuid type data of course I would not see to be saved. Although on my fstab, I use simple /dev/sdXX entries (/dev/sda1) not uuids. device.map might have to be regenerated too to get a booting system.
You must have a system that has been updated for a long time or manually configured. /dev entries haven't been used for a long time, only UUIDs now. "dump" works primarily at the file level, not the filesystem level, so it doesn't backup the filesystem metadata. If you do a restore, you will have to create the filesystem first, where you can specify the UUID if you know what it is.
I did not leave out anything system wise specifically by cli options. /var, /sys, /run, /tmp, /proc I am assuming are in the level 0 dump. The switches I used were:
/sys, /run, /tmp, and /proc are virtual filesystems and not part of /, so you will get the directory entries themselves, but no content, which is what you want anyway.