On 2013-10-12 Sat 11:47 AM |, Rodolfo Gouveia wrote: > > When /var is a real partition, there is a device node that corresponds to it > and the > group operator has read permissions on it. >
Where possible, unmount partitions before dumping & dump the RAW character device: <operator@oak:~ 0>$ ls -l /dev/sd5f brw-r----- 1 root operator 4, 85 Aug 29 16:41 /dev/sd5f <operator@oak:~ 0>$ ls -l /dev/rsd5f crw-r----- 1 root operator 13, 85 Aug 29 16:41 /dev/rsd5f Note that operator's home is /operator (not /home/operator) so /home can be unmounted for dumping. 19.12.7 Which Backup Program Is Best? dump(8) Period. Elizabeth D. Zwicky torture tested all the backup programs discussed here. The clear choice for preserving all your data and all the peculiarities of UNIX file systems is dump. Elizabeth created file systems containing a large variety of unusual conditions (and some not so unusual ones) and tested each program by doing a backup and restore of those file systems. The peculiarities included: files with holes, files with holes and a block of nulls, files with funny characters in their names, unreadable and unwritable files, devices, files that change size during the backup, files that are created/deleted during the backup and more. She presented the results at LISA V in Oct. 1991. 5.0 Conclusions (Zwicky): These results are in most cases stunningly appalling. dump comes out ahead, which is no great surprise. Tools tested were: tar, gnutar, bar, cpio, pax, afio, fbackup, and bru. Almost all backup utilities are based on these tools underneath. Others use rsync, which is also not as reliable as dump as like the other tools, it does not work with the raw binary data of an (unmounted) disk. References: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/backup-basics.html http://www.coredumps.de/doc/dump/zwicky/testdump.doc.html Cheers, -- Craig Skinner | http://twitter.com/Craig_Skinner | http://linkd.in/yGqkv7
