[Novalug] is this obvious (to everyone but me?)

Rich Kulawiec rsk@gsp.org
Sun Apr 12 05:34:04 EDT 2015


On Sat, Apr 11, 2015 at 07:25:59PM -0400, James Ewing Cottrell III via Novalug wrote:
> I would avoid dump. It's pretty obsolete, and there is even concern
> that it work on ext based filesystems. There is a better way.

Nonsense.  It works *beautifully* on ext-based filesystems. (And on
UFS-based ones.)  I know, I've used it extensively for decades in all
kinds of operations and it has never failed to yield a usable backup.
(I test them all with restore post-dump to make sure that they're
readable/intact/etc.)  And while the run-time performance on Linux isn't
as good as the performance on BSD or Solaris (due to implementation
differences) the ability to perform incremental dumps almost always
means, in practice in production environments, that it doesn't matter.

Besides, as I pointed out, a copy made with rsync is just that: a copy.
It's not a backup.

---rsk



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