Dump and filesystem types

[Chris Kottaridis]

On Sat, 2010-04-17 at 18:47 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> Just use tar. Dump/restore is designed for fast backup and restoring
> of
> filesystem images. Among other things, this ties you to a specific
> filesystem type and partition size. Tar is more flexible and doesn't
> care what the filesystem is (within reason).

One of the reasons I have used dump for this process is that if I run
into something unexpected and all I want to do is get back to where I
was, I can put things back as closely as possible. I realize I can get
all the data back with tar also. But, dump has the inode numbers and
file system specific details in it as well and I think a restore -r may
even preserve the inodes, though I don't know for sure. So, generally I
like to use dump to handle the catastrophic situation.

After some more poking around seems dump has a problem at the moment but
the expectation is it will work with ext4 at some time.

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=511651

I may stick with ext3 for now when I upgrade and then once dump gets
sorted out I'll consider moving up to ext 4. I am not even sure what the
difference is for now, I'll do some more research on ext4 before
committing to it.

Thanks
Chris Kottaridis