On Mon, May 31, 2004 at 09:14:16PM -0700, gen2 wrote:
> > /dev/sda9 is NOT a mount point, its a descriptor only and will
> > probably fail forever.
> >
> > now, if that disk is mounted someplace, as in /mnt/sda9 on the machine
> > whose alias is node1, and it is mounted when amdump runs, it should
> > work like a champ.
> 
> Ok, what I'm experiencing lends that a lot of credence, but what sent me off 
> in this direction was (from the amanda distribution, example disklist 
> entries)
> 
> # Dump Joe's NetBSD machine, with the mounted MS-DOS partition dumped
> # using tar.
> #joespc  wd0a comp-root
> #joespc  wd0e comp-user
> #joespc /msdos comp-user-tar
> 
> which seems to imply that it's possible to back up unmounted partitions, and 
> that would be really great! I've always been under the impression that this 
> was amanda-possible somehow, but never have been able to make it happen.
> 
> Seems like this would be the way to back up a partition regardless of 
> formatting (like an HFS+ or NT part, which is really what I'm after).

If the program you tell amanda to use for the backup is a version
of tar, then it can only backup files and directories.  That is a 
property of tar, not amanda.  And of course, for there to be files
and directories, the partition must be mounted.

If instead you tell amanda to use a version of dump, those programs
generally work at the device level (even when told to work on a
mount point) and should be able to backup umounted partitions.

-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
 JG Computing
 4455 Province Line Road        (609) 252-0159
 Princeton, NJ  08540-4322      (609) 683-7220 (fax)