I have a few questions and I was torn between asking them separately and putting them all in one message. I decided for the latter and I hope this is not a problem. Once upon a time, many many years ago, I used to make backup copies of my file systems with the 'cp -aux' command, including my live root file system. Luckily, I never had to restore any live root file system from those backups. They probably would never have worked. Later on, someone taught me to do it like this: find /source -xdev -print0 | cpio -pa0V /target That command is supposed to copy everything, including special files (not really sure which) that mere cp or even rsync would not copy. I actually used that approach several times, including restoration, and it always worked. For some reason, I stopped making backups of my live root file system, but I still backup other partitions with rsync, always with the --delete-before parameter, so the target is always an exact copy of the source. I have been using XFS for a few years and thought that maybe it's time I enjoyed all the benefits of the XFS management tools. However, I am uncertain about things I haven't been able to find in the documentation or even on the Web: Question #1: Does xfsdump really copy EVERYTHING? Can I backup a full live root file system with it and expect a restored copy to boot and run uneventfully? Or should I rather do a 'hard' image with xfs_copy? Question #2: By the way, I see that pcmanfm can mount an xfs_copy image quite easily, but how do I mount it on the command line, and can I mount it in rw mode? Question #3: If I make incremental backups with several levels then perform a restore, I know that files added in subsequent levels will be added to the dump, but what happens with files that have been deleted in the source file system? Will they be removed from the dump? In other words, is there something analogous to rsync's --delete-before in xfsdump/xfsrestore? Question #4: Is there any benefit to making incremental backups of a small file system? I mean, it's just 10GB, and deleting the old backup and doing a level 0 dump from scratch would take what, 3 minutes. Please note that my goal is disaster recovery. I am planning to run a few experiments on my live root file and must be able to restore it to a certain state whenever necessary. Thanks in advance, -- Luciano ES >> -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-xfs" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
