From: bsa@kf8nh.wariat.org (Brandon S. Allbery) Subject: Re: should i use dump/restore? Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1993 02:51:54 GMT
In article <C4rw61.Inr@crdnns.crd.ge.com> davidsen@crd.ge.com (bill davidsen) writes:
>In article <14048@cayman.COM>, pgf@cayman.com (Paul Fox) writes:
>| Why do I always seem to follow-up my own postings? Someone has pointed out
>| that dump/restore "know" about the internals of the BSD filesystem, and
>| therefore won't work on linux.
>
> I sent dir4ect mail to Paul, they have been ported to SysV, so it can
>be done. I also suggested not doing it, but if he wants the save format
>is NOT really BSD dependent.
Sigh. Dump and restor (note the missing "e", for you Unix historians) came
from the Seventh Research Edition, so they started out with the "System V"
filesystem (512-byte blocks a' la V7, though, not S51K or the 386 variant
which should really be called S54K). UCB rewrote them completely, giving
restor(e) a badly-needed overhaul and changing them to support the BSD FFS
instead of the V7 filesystem.
The point is that you need to support all the filesystem types you plan to
use, either by building them all into it or by having separate
{m,e,e2,x,l,{ffs|ufs},...}{dump,restore} programs. Remember, these are
designed to work on *unmounted* filesystems! I prefer "tar"; you have to be
more careful about the filesystem being quiescent (but how many people worry
enough about this on *any* system to reboot off a floppy to back up their root
partition anyway?) but at least tar doesn't have to know the filesystem format
--- it will even back up your DOS partitions if you mount them! This is much
cleaner.
++Brandon
-- Brandon S. Allbery bsa@kf8nh.wariat.orgIt's not too late to turn back from the "Gates" of Hell... Linux: the FREE 32-bit operating system, available NOW. Why waaaaaait for NT?