[kwlug-disc] Backup and Recovery in the 21st Century

[Chris Irwin]

On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 09:29, Khalid Baheyeldin <kb at 2bits.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 11:52 PM, Chris Irwin <chris at chrisirwin.ca> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 2010-01-08 at 18:50 -0500, Khalid Baheyeldin wrote:
>> > Dump is a very old utility, yet very useful.
>>
>> It seems dump is not available for ext4 at present anyway, so I'm stuck
>> with something else. I'm still somewhat curious what the actual benefit
>> is. I saw some vague references to speed improvements (meh, it runs at
>> night) and a comparison done on BSD systems in 1991. Other than that,
>> there doesn't seem to be much info on why it is a better choice, just
>> that it works differently.
>>
>
> The fact that it does incremental backup natively, understanding the
> difference between a full and an incremental. It also does many levels
> of incremental if you need that (Tower of Hanoi scheme).
>
> The fact that it works on the file system level also has advantages. You
> can restore a partition EXACTLY to what it was before. This means
> timestamps, ownerships, access times, ...etc.
>

That would be advantageous. I wonder if there will be ext4 support in the
future. From a mail list entry from Theodore Ts'o, it looks like if you
modify dump to remove the capability checks on the file system, it "should"
work fine for ext4.... I'm not keen on being the first to test that...

How is a dump in terms of file size compared to tar? Does it still make
sense to pass through gzip? (Understanding that benefit of gzip varies
depending on data)

-- 
Chris Irwin
<chris at chrisirwin.ca>
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