On Thu, Jan 06, 2005 at 04:13:16PM -0500, Kirkwood, David A wrote: > Does dump work reliably on an ext3 filesystem? > > Here's the senario: > > I have a raid 5 linux system ( RH 7.3 ). I currently backup the system to > tape in case of catastrophic failure. I am up to multitape backups for full > user partitions.I want to use incremental dumps and spread my full system > dumps further apart, but tme man page says dump can be used for ext2. There > is no mention of ext3 one way or the other. Assuming 1 tape drive, the need > to do backups unattended, the inability to shut the system down > everttime I need to dump files, I need to use dump unless someone has a > better solution. New backup h/w etc in not an option as i have already > submitted need for tape library etc and its working its way through the > corporate higharchy but it may be 6 month untill I see something. > > As always, all input is appreciated. > > Dave I'm not 100% certain of this, but it should work. File system wise, ext3 is just ext2 with a journal inode (which looks like a regular ext2 file). I suppose it is possible that dump might have a problem with the journal inode on a mounted ext3 system, but even if that is the case it should be easy to work around, as it seems Dump 0.4b36 from http://sourceforge.net/projects/dump/ supports ext3 (all versions do, but that's the only one called ext2/ext3 dump). You might also be interested to read this, from http://nslug.ns.ca/pipermail/nslug/2003-November/005980.html > Changes between versions 0.4b9 and 0.4b10 (released November 21, 1999) > ====================================================================== > ... > 4. Integrate a patch from Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy at goop.org> > which allows dump on an active ext3 filesystem. However, this > is a "quick and dirty" patch which enables backup of an ext3 > filesystem through the ext2 compatibility (by ignoring the > NEEDS_RECOVERY bit). The journal file is not recognized and > it is dumped (it should not). > > > Unless I have missed something, nobody ever saw a need to improve on the > "quick and dirty" patch (or at least there is no subsequent mention of ext3 > in the changelog) so it should be possible with a modern 'dump' to dump ext3 > and get exactly the same results as if the filesystem had been ext2, just as > it says above. > -- Infinite complexity begets infinite beauty. Infinite precision begets infinite perfection. - : send the line "unsubscribe linux-admin" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
