[lug] OT: WAS: Tape Drives --- NOW: Emacs vs. vi !!! ;-)

[Bear Giles]

Paul Walmsley wrote:
> On Wed, 30 Oct 2002, Bear Giles wrote:
> 
>>Dump/restore are no longer safe. 
> 
> dump works fine as long as the filesystem it's backing up is unmounted.  
> dump will usually work fine if the filesystem it's backing up is mounted,
> but is flushed to disk and is not being changed.

Well yeah, but how many people do you think actually do this? 
Professionals should, but what about the average person using Linux today?

Tar and the like may not be as elegant as dump, but at least they're 
largely work when run against a live FS.  (There's still the problem of 
files changing under them, esp. if the writer doesn't bother to set 
flocks()).

> but dump on a filesystem that's mounted and is actively being changed is
> asking for trouble.

I suspect that many people don't realize this, or don't understand that 
even a "quiet" filesystem may be unsafe to dump if the kernel pages 
haven't been flushed to disk.

Bear