Linux backup

[Malcolm Kay]

On Thursday 19 August 2004 22:04, Kenneth Goodwin wrote:
.....
> I use CPIO on all my systems, it whines about missing files,
> etc, but does not abort.
>

Sounds good -- but I might have been too hasty in my
criticism of 'tar'. See my follow up e-mail.

> You could use DD if you want something "dump" like.

Seeme to me that this must have all the problems espoused
for 'dump' on Linux plus a raft of its own. In my 
inexperienced days I used 'dd' to clone a system and while
it sort-of worked it exhibited the problems you mentioned.
But above all it was a very slow way to go -- you end up
cloning even the empty parts of the drive. 

Now I clone unix systems (not Linux) using 'dump' and 'restore'
with both drives mounted in the same machine. A little scripting
takes care of partitioning the new drive, changing hostname, 
IP address and one or two other trivia.

> But I stay away from dump and DD because it is a lot harder
> to recover a system if the replacement
> drive has a different geometry, etc as they are disk image
> copies. You also have to fsck the filesystem
> because it will be out of synch especially in your
> environment where I/O is continuing to the drives
> while backups are underway. So they really wont guarantee a
> stable backup in your environment.
>

Thanks for your comments

Malcolm Kay