Re: Hot-backup a complete Debian install
On Wed, Oct 01, 2003 at 11:52:29PM +0900, Nathan Ollerenshaw wrote:
> On Oct 1, 2003, at 10:51 PM, DI Peter Burgstaller wrote:
>
> >That is exactly the beauty of dump. I would have suggested dd for
> >backup/restore but there
> >you have the problem of identical fdisk settings. Dump/restore can
> >deal well with bigger partitions.
>
> Definitely use dump.
>
> Its much faster than anything else and if you really learn how to use
> it, you can do incremental backups very quickly.
Just quickly, does dump/restore's incremental backups do correct
system "snapshots", accurately recording deleted/renamed etc files, or
does it just backup files with ctimes/mtimes greater than the last
backup?
Last time I looked, which was admittedly a long time ago, very few
tools did incremental backups "properly". You couldn't accurately
restore a full system from an incremental backup... you would get
extra files that had been deleted by the time of the incremental
backup. Even worse, many backup tools just use mtime/ctime to detect
"changed files", which misses renamed files.
I'm pretty sure dump/restore was one of the ones that didn't do it
properly.
At the time one of the few that did incrementals right was a little
shell script called "tob". I believe another more recent tool that
does is rdiff-backup.
--
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Donovan Baarda http://minkirri.apana.org.au/~abo/
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