On 11/08/2005, at 6:21 AM, Mark D. Rodriguez wrote:

Stuart,

I am not a Solaris expert so please bare with me on my suggestions.

First of all you might try backing the filesystem up by using a
"virtualmountpoint", this option has worked for me in the past on
unsupported file systems in Linux.

Now in regards to your image backups.  Again, I am more of a Linux guy
then Solaris, but in Linux there is a "mknod" command the lets you
create block or character special files, i.e. devices.  Does Solaris
have a similar command?  If so why not just create unique device names
that have the same device major and minor numbers as the fssnap
devices.  They would be effectively the same device!  Then you could
backup using those unique names and everything would then be kept
straight.  It would require some scripting but it could be done.

I do hear where you're coming from, and yes, in theory it should be
doable ... the main hassle, though, is that this would mean a fair
amount of fiddling. I'd prefer to keep things as simple as possible,
on the basis that that way, there's less to go wrong.

Virtual mount points aren't really what I'm after -- yes, fssnap will
probably let me do an incremental backup of a point in time, but I
want to do an image backup, not a file-level backup. I do apologise
if my comments weren't clear on that point. So whilst your comments
are good, they don't quite get to where I want to go.

Thanks for the suggestions nonetheless; they might well be of use in
other applications. Just not in this one, alas.