dump on ext3 system

[Yu Ting LIU]

Hi,

I have a Linux Red Hat 7.2 system. But I create each partition as ext3 file system. Is it possible for me to use dump to backup each partition? if can not any other command or tool to backup partition?

Thanks & Regards!
Yu Ting

[Alexander Chuzhoy]

First of all -technically you can backup ext3 with dump ,although Linus encourages not to use dump.
You have a lot of backup utilitis:
Amanda,arkeia or using tarballs.

[Muthukumar_5]

hai,

We can use the dump to backup.

check here at,
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dump/

We have to use output medium as like tape to get that backup. It is same when all file systems are ext2 ( except /dev/shm ).

Regards,
Muthukumar.

[Yu Ting LIU]

The man page of dump tells me that dump is only for ext2 file system. And I have tried to backup the partition to either a tape or a file but it always ask me to put in the new volume though my partition is only hundreds Mega bytes and my tape is 4 GB capacity without compressing.

Thanks & Regards!
Yu Ting

[Muthukumar_5]

hai,

what is ur dump version (/sbin/dump). I hope it is very old one. version 0.4b36 supports ext2/ext3 file systems.

Check here. It will give the details.
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=369982

Regards,
Muthukumar.

[Yu Ting LIU]

But this version of dump rpm package is not for Linux Red Hat 7.2.

I tried it. It's not successful.

Thanks & Regards!
Yu Ting

[Bill Thorsteinson]

I use dump with ext3 on Debian Linux.
It appears that Red Hat 7.2 does not fully
support ext3, if they don't include and updated
dump package. Check the upgrades site.

Due to kernel caching of data , dump is not
recommended for backups on Linux.
I would suggest you look a PAX which outputs
both tar and cpio format backups. You could
also look at using tar or cpio. These three
tools read the files rather than the disk so
bypass the kernel caching problem. The
disadvantage is either the access or inode
timestamps are changed.
You can avoid this if you don't track access
access times. This can be turned off only during the backups using the remount option
of mount.

[Yu Ting LIU]

In fact my purpose is to backup the system by partition. So other than dump command is there any other tools or commands to backup the system by partition?

Thanks & Regards!
Yu Ting

[Muthukumar_5]

By simply, get the file system status with df command, then use

tar -cvjf .tar.bz2

Get the bunzipped file, ( a effective compress of archieved files ). Then write it to your backup tape drive.

You can unarchieve as,
tar -xvjf .tar.bz2

Or use gunzip with tar as,
tar -cvzf and tar -xvzf

[Yu Ting LIU]

Hi,

It's not working for root partition.

Now I can confirm that dump on ext3 file system is not supported on Linux Red Hat 7.2 so I have to change my way to find other solution though I am used to dump/restore commands and think they are better than tar, cpio.... My case is that there is no tape drive connecting to my Linux server and I have to consider backup my Linux server's each partition to each file and then remote copy to another computer's hard disk to save it.

Thanks & Regards!
Yu Ting