[lug] Tape backup app

[Nate Duehr]

B Giles wrote:

>> I use 'dump' and a crontab for that.  I tend to use dump rather than tar
>> not so much for 'dump' itself, but for 'restore', because I like its
>> interactive mode (like a shell) to restore just one or two files or
>> directories from an archive easily.
> 
> 
> Isn't 'dump' unsafe now?  The problem is that 'dump' reads the raw disk 
> partition, but the kernel now does extensive caching of disk pages.  
> This doesn't just mean that files may be missing the last few lines of 
> text, they could be totally unrecoverable.

Wouldn't a simple "sync" before the dump on a quiet filesystem take care 
of that in theory?  Probably a good idea to have it at the top of backup 
scripts anyway...?

-- 
Nate Duehr, nate at natetech.com