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

[Khalid Baheyeldin]

On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 2:27 PM, Chris Irwin <chris at chrisirwin.ca> wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 13:19, Khalid Baheyeldin <kb at 2bits.com> wrote:
>
>> Re: ext4.
>>
>> The print server I had was a clean Kubuntu 9.10 install, and defaulted
>> to ext4. So I tried installing dump from the repository and it did install
>> successfully.
>>
>> I ran dump on the / partition and it seemed to work. I used restore to
>> list the contents of the dump and it did list the files in it.
>>
>> So, are you sure that ext4 does NOT support dump?
>
>
> Great, you made me put my money where my mouth was and I lost. :)
>
> I was making an assumption based on the man page (which still says ext2/3)
> and google searches that corroborated it. In retrospect, I suppose nobody
> posts to mailing lists saying "EVERYTHING IS OKAY", so if you're doing a
> search to find problems, you'll only find problems. I should have, you know,
> checked the actual documentation and changelogs.
>
> I did an `apt-get source dump` on Ubuntu Karmic, and it seems that dump
> 0.4b42-1 has the following entry in the debian/changelog:
>     * new upstream version, closes: #378349, #511651
>
> The former refers to a documentation issue (not the ext4 omission), but the
> later[1] refers to ext4. It seems dump was silently "working" but dumping
> unrecoverable garbage from ext4, which is obviously bad (it should succeed
> or fail, not both).
>
>     [1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=511651
>
> Since this appears to be solved, I decided to see what the upstream CHANGES
> file had to say. Between b41 and b42 is the following entry:
>     * Add (preliminary) ext4 support - thanks to libext2fs which does all
> the job for us. Thanks to Gertjan van Wingerde for the patch.
>
> So it looks like there is at least some support for ext4. It also seems
> that since b40 Extended Attributes and ACLs are supported. I also noticed
> that this update for ext4 support came out 18 June 2009, while the previous
> release was over three years earlier on 2 January 2006. I'm not sure if that
> is a feature or a deterrent when it comes to backup software :)
>

Thanks for the clarification.


> Since I am using LVM, I think snapshots + dump is going to prove quite
> effective.
>

Please post where you get with this, it would be interesting to many of us.

Also, for the original tape question: I would still be interested in
affordable tape
backup drives that can do hundreds of GBs per cartridge and does not require
a firstborn.
-- 
Khalid M. Baheyeldin
2bits.com, Inc.
http://2bits.com
Drupal optimization, development, customization and consulting.
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. --  Edsger W.Dijkstra
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. --   Leonardo da Vinci
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