--On Friday, August 17, 2007 8:56 PM -0400 Scott Ehrlich <scott@xxxxxxx>
wrote:
I tried dump, which looked like it was working, but I have no idea what
files it was backing up, and couldn't find an option in the man page to
have it show me the files. I would have let it go, but since I couldn't
be sure about /mnt recusion, I opted out of it.
dump is great. I've been using it since Red Hat 5.2.
It doesn't back up through the filesystem. It backs up directly through the
raw device, using the ext3 library. Because of this, it backs up one
partition per invocation. If you want to back up more than one partition,
you need to run dump multiple times, saving each dump file separately. Dump
first saves partition-wide metadata, then the directories, then the files.
It can optionally write helper files (quick file access, or QFA) to make it
easy for restore to rapidly find a file in a restore operation even if your
dump spans multiple tapes. (The QFA file records the seek points for each
inode.)
By default, dump saves the entire partition. You can mark files to exclude
(using chattr) and with an appropriate command line switch dump will then
exclude those files.
Because dump uses the raw device and not the filesystem, it will also backup
files hidden behind a mount point. This can make verify operations (using
restore) confusing because restore *does* use the filesystem and won't be
able to reach the files hidden behind mount points. But you do get an
accurate representation of the real state of the partition.
dump has its own support page and mailing list:
<http://dump.sourceforge.net/>
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