Re: Looking for a backup to CD-R(W) program

[Chris Lale]

Gerald Livingston wrote:
> On Mon, 25 Nov 2002 20:08:53 -0500 (EST) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Joe
> Nahmias) wrote:
>
>
>> Chris,
>>
>> Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought Linus himself said that
>> using dump on live (mounted) filesystems was a bad idea. I'll see
>> if I can dig up a reference to it...


I did a quick search:
http://search.alphanet.ch/cgi-bin/search.cgi?max_results=10&type=long&msgid=20011010173449.Q10443%40turbolinux.com&domain=ml-linux-kernel

and found this email in the Linux kernel mailing list archive:

> Andreas Dilger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>
>> Yes, but the only issue is if the filesystem is busy, you may get a
>> bad backup for those files that have changed, but not for any
>> files that have not changed during the backup.
>>
>> Reasons for not using tar or cpio include atime change and the fact
>> that an "incremental" tar can't record the deletion of a file
>> (AFAIK).
>>

I have not had any problems, but I am backing-up a home standalone PC
and I do not multitask during the backup, so no files change during the
backup. It would seem safest to boot into a second copy of Debian and run 'dump' from there. I do this for the large system backup anyway.

Perhaps the 'changed file' problem is only an issue with 'cdbackup'? Presumably it would be accessing files during the backup process. In any case, backing up directly to CD seems to pose a much greater risk of backup corruption.

Cheers,

Chris.
--
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