afabianaustin.rr.com
Date: Tue Nov 09 2004 - 21:35:51 CST

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On Tue, Nov 09, 2004 at 05:55:29PM -0800, Tim wrote:

> Are there any "gotchas" to using pax instead of dump
> to do full system backups on openbsd? I'm a newbie
> who only uses openbsd. I'm just looking for advise
> from any long-time unix admins out there.

From what I gather, dump is the utility that can handle the most
file-system anamolies most gracefully, due to its method of operation.
Dump also preserves your atimes, which a utility like pax will
necessarily change. Dump also has good incremental facilities; I
played with GNU tar for a while, which can apparently work
incrementally, and has a good reputation for robustness, but this
isn't very well-explained in the info documentation or the manual
page, and playing with it for a while didn't bring any enlightenment,
either. I know that restore is in the installation RAMDISK kernel,
which is handy; I haven't checked, but presumably, there's something
that will restore tar archives, too. No back-up method is particularly
reliable on a live filesystem without some kind of snapshot mechanism;
I've read that a whole dump could be corrupted if a file is being
changed while it's archived. With GNU tar, only the file being
changed should be corrupted. With the pax utility, I don't know.
Anything is probably fine, but you might want to go single-user
before doing it.

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