Thanks for all those great comments !
Is the a way to tune (or bypass) the estimated time ?



Paul Bijnens wrote:

FM wrote:

Some partition have millions of html files

I do not use dump because of this L Torvalds email :
http://lwn.net/2001/0503/a/lt-dump.php3

That was 2001.
In that time ext2dump had no maintainer.
That has change, and dump has catched up again.

And the main reason (but that counts for Solaris too),
is that using dump on active filesystems can result
in worthless backups.  On a quiet filesystem it is
normally safe.  (But I'm a gnutar user, personally.)

Another possibility is to mount with "noatime" option.
It will not reduce the 10 hours to 1, but will gain
maybe 10-20%.

The reason that estimate takes longer is probably because
the estimate need to be done for level 0, level N, and maybe
level N+1 for eachfilesystem.