On Fri, 10 Apr 2009, Robin Hill wrote:
On Fri Apr 10, 2009 at 12:22:44PM -0700, Timothy D. Lenz wrote:
How can cp not work? every guide I found used ether cp or rsync. Even
guides on seting up an auto backup system use cp or rsync.
Seems the only files/folders that shouldn't get copied are the block
device ones that are created at boot and are not really on the drive.
They'll all get copied, but you won't necessarily get the correct
contents. Because the system is in use:
- files will be being written, so you'll either get a partial copy, or
an old version.
- files may be locked, so you won't be able to copy them.
Doing a backup of a running system using cp/rsync will work fine for a
lot of things (especially for config files, documents, etc) but will
almost certainly fail miserably for some (databases for example).
Can you cite an example of a file that can't be copied on a "running
system?"
Sure, there are issues if the system is really up and running multi-user
with log files that will be copied partially and probably end up
terminated with extra nulls, database files may have issues (i.e. mysql if
you don't flush and lock the tables, copied tables will be corrupt but are
usually trivially repairable), but I've never heard of files not being at
all readable.
The idea that "it just won't work because critical files are locked"
sounds like Windows talk.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Jon Lewis | I route
Senior Network Engineer | therefore you are
Atlantic Net |
_________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________
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