[SATLUG] How do you take a dump?

[Brad Knowles]

At 12:02 AM -0600 2/8/07, twistedpickles wrote:

>  I've been reading and reading. The more traditional utilities appear
>  to be dump and tar. Recently I have stumbled across rsync.
>
>  How do you backup info to HD's?

What are you looking for?  Typically, dump is a filesystem-level 
backup, and vendors have had to make modifications to the code to 
support their local peculiarities in their OS.  But tar and cpio are 
file-based backup tools, and more cross-platform.

Problem is, dump tends to know how to deal with problems like sparse 
files, which tar and cpio don't.  Of course, they each have their own 
set of problems when you're trying to backup a live filesystem.

Which leads us to the issue of snapshots -- if you can take a 
filesystem or volume snapshot, it's a lot easier to back that up via 
whatever mechanism you want.

Tools like rsync are much more useful if you're doing a sync or a 
backup to a remote system.


The canonical book in this field is "Unix Backup and Recovery" by 
Curtis W. Preston.  However, that's out of print, and is being 
replaced by "Backup and Recovery", which covers a lot more OSes.  See 
<http://www.oreillynet.com/catalog/9780596102463/> for more info.

Disclosure: Curtis is a former co-worker of mine, and I've been an 
uncredited technical reviewer of some of his books.  But when it 
comes to backup and recovery, there's no one who knows the business 
better, or that I trust more.

There's some good stuff on backup & recovery that has taken place on 
the sage-members mailing list, and the archives are publicly 
searchable.  There are also some good white papers and some good 
conference presentations that are archived and publicly available at 
the USENIX web site.  The search box at <http://www.sage.org/> will 
include the archives of the mailing list, and the search box at 
<http://www.usenix.org/> will include the conference proceedings.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>, Consultant & Author
Co-author of SAGE Booklet #15 "Internet Postmaster: Duties and 
Responsibilities"
Founding Member and Platinum Individual Sponsor of LOPSA: 
<http://www.lopsa.org>
Papers: <http://tinyurl.com/tj6q4> LinkedIn Profile: 
<http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>