[plug] Backups

[James Devenish]

In message <41060BB8.7030507 at postnewspapers.com.au>
on Tue, Jul 27, 2004 at 04:00:56PM +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:
> Another issue is that many of them don't restore hard links, and it's
> especially dificult to do so in incremental backups or backups of a
> subtree of the filesystem.

Doh! I was going to mention that as a `dump`-style feature but thought
twice about it for some reason. I should have mentioned incremental
backups in the same breath, but I forgot.

> Indeed. I've never been too sure about using filesystem dumpers, in
> part because of issues that they might be a wee bit /too/ faithful and
> possibly reproduce some forms of FS corruption.

I'd not assumed it was any more or less of a problem than high-level
archivers (e.g. if you have overlapping blocks or corrupted file
lengths, those are going to affect high-level archivers, too).

> I'm also not sure how easy it is to do a partial restore, or to
> restore into a working directory or temporary volume.

Just FYI, I don't recall any problems with either of those.

> I think I'd prefer to use a `dump` program, if availible for the 
> filesystem type I was working on, in preference to `dd`, though.

LOL