Risks of backing up live mounted filesystems using dump(8)

Mike McCarty Mike.McCarty at sbcglobal.net
Tue Mar 2 03:30:32 UTC 2010


Jeff Metcalf wrote:
> <alan at lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> wrote:

[...]

> A file system based backup is a good deal safer. 
> 
> Isn't dump(8) considered a filesystem based backup?  Are you refering to something more specialized?

Yes, it is. I suspect he meant a files based backup. With
dump, what one gets is a dump of the file system itself,
as opposed to the data it contains. With a files based
backup, one gets a copy of the data saved, but not the
file system. So, for example, using tar, or cpio, one can
back up a system using ext3, and recover to a system which
uses reiserfs. One cannot do that with dump and restore,
which store the file system itself. The dump and restore
work at a lower level than files based backup.

Mike
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