PDA

View Full Version : backing up via 'dump'...

Damien787
05-05-2008, 04:58 AM
Greetings fellow daemons,
I'm trying to backup my system via an external USB drive via 'dump'. Basically I want to back up the / /var and /usr filesystems to similar partitions on the USB drive. I used fdisk and the disklabel editor to format and create 3 partitions on my USB drive. How can I use dump to mirror the partitions on my system. So far I have had no much success...dump doesn't seem recognize the filesystems created on my USB drive and when I try to back up my filesystems to files on the external drive it doesn't seem to be successful (backing up / and /var created two files the exact same size and far less than the actual size of either partitions)

Are there any good how-tos out there I may find useful...should I be using different backup tools?

Is 'dd' as effective as the man pages seem to suggest? Are there significant issues in backing up a live filesystem this way?

Thanks in advance,
Damien
ephemera
05-05-2008, 07:05 AM
please be more specific:

show us how you are using dump.
precisely what errors are you getting?
fdisk/disklabel o/p of usb and so on...
Damien787
05-06-2008, 01:41 AM
Well...this is the format of the command I used to back up my filesystems...

dump -0uaLn -f - /usr | gzip -2 | dd of=/media/iomega/usr/dump-usr-5-5.gz

Didn't take as long as I expected (about 4 hours)...even though /usr was a 50GB filesystem and the pipe was USB 1.0.

--Damien
chavez243
05-06-2008, 02:09 AM
backup options are many and varied... I might lean towards tar for what you are doing. I use dump for backing up to tape and dd for imaging entire disks.

Also - google Clonezilla - nice tool to add to your kit.
18Googol2
05-06-2008, 04:37 AM
backup options are many and varied... I might lean towards tar for what you are doing. I use dump for backing up to tape and dd for imaging entire disks.

Also - google Clonezilla - nice tool to add to your kit.

dd can run under FreeBSD, can Clonezilla do it too? This is to save the system goes reboot and downtime, not good if its a server
chavez243
05-08-2008, 02:05 AM
Clonezilla is a liveCD - so its use necessitates downtime. Another option is to generate snapshots using dd and output across the wire to an nfs or cifs share. You can pipe it to gzip first if desired, but with the size of today's NAS units, space it not a big issue.