Re: dd if=/dev/hda

[Danny Sauer <sauer@cloudmaster.com>]

Tar reads the whole file sequentially, though, so it's far less likely
to corrupt individual files than dd (reading in disk order) - and it'll
respect locks that are placed on files by conciencious programmers.
Sun's concerend about absolute reliability - I'm willing to make a little
convenience tradeoff... :)

That said, I use rsync at a time of low system activity to back up
the non-dynamic parts of the system (and the mailspools, but using
maildir makes this pretty safe).  The log files are rotated on their
own schedule into a backed-up directory, and mysql is dumped into a
backed-up directory just prior to the backup.  The backup doesn't get
absolutely up-to-the-second data, but it's close enough.  Hopefully
I'll actually get space to back more stuff up and burn it to DVD-RW
pretty soon.  DVD-RW drives are getting darn near affordable[1], and the
media's reasonable finally.  If only I could find a robot for that
media.

--Danny, with the low-tech bias

[1] A Pioneer 104 drive (the OEM version of the AO4) runs about $385

On Tue, Apr 02, 2002 at 10:36:58AM -0600, Bob T. Kat wrote:
> Of course if you ask sun they say you should always drop into single
> user mode to do any kind of backup, and of coarse you should always be
> at the console when the backup is going on and you need to unmount all
> filesystems being backed up and manually fsck after the backup just to
> be sure, that's odd I've always used tar from cron to do my backups but
> that's just me (I like tar, it seems to work great with tapes ;)
> I'm just curious as to what some of the favorite backup methods for
> admins on this list, like I said tar has been about all I've ever needed
> although I have duplicated disks (mounted read only that were not part
> of the booted file system) using dd and it worked really nice
> 
> Bob T. Kat
> just putting in my .0083 pounds 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: luci-discuss-owner@luci.org [mailto:luci-discuss-owner@luci.org]
> On Behalf Of Danny Sauer
> Sent: Tuesday, April 02, 2002 9:37 AM
> To: luci-discuss@luci.org
> Subject: Re: dd if=/dev/hda
> 
> It'd be a real good idea to drop to single user mode, turn off any swap
> partitions on the drive, and remount all the filesystems on that drive
> as readonly first ("mount -o remount,ro /") before doing such a thing.
> There's that whole thing with files being a series of blocks that point
> to each other and directories being a pointer to all of the files
> inside.
[... snip ...]

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