On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 9:03 PM, David Christensen
<dpchrist@holgerdanske.com <mailto:dpchrist@holgerdanske.com>> wrote:
On 01/15/2015 08:47 PM, Kevin O'Gorman wrote:
I was hoping for some details on why this won't work on system
drives, or
conditions under which it just might. Another user has
suggested I read
https://help.ubuntu.com/__community/BackupYourSystem/TAR
<https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BackupYourSystem/TAR> which
suggests that
it actually should work.
That would require an in-depth understanding of the Linux kernel,
which I don't have. (My answer was geared towards practical system
administration; it works reliably for me.)
If you want to learn everything required to explain why a file
system level self-backup of an operational system drive won't work,
or how to make it work (and how to restore it), more power to you.
If you would care to post what you find, I'd like to read it.
No promises, but I might just take you upon that. I don't think it will
take any kernel knowledge, but some of the daemons may be an issue. As
a first step, I may take a self-dump then do a fast reboot to another OS
or partition, restore the dump to a new place and do a compare. If the
list of suspects (outside of /tmp and such) is huge, I may give up. If
not, I may learn something.
I care because I like to have a lot of free space in my partitions, but
I hate to use backup time and space on the holes.