On Fri, Dec 02, 2005 at 09:46:57AM +0100, Jehan PROCACCIA wrote:
> Ram Krishnamurthy wrote:
> 
> >Hi Jehan
> >What do you mean by
> >> Since then, I fsck.ext3 -f the /var partition which caused me the
> >> problems, it works fine now (last 3 days) ,
> >
> >What works fine? The restore? Are you not seeing the file corruption 
> >anymore?
> 
> Yes the restore worked fine, but maybe it's not due to the fact that I 
> run fsck, but only because since those last 3 days, nobody was 
> manipulating the files while they were dumped !?
> Someone else on this list (Paul Bijnens) told me that it is most 
> certainly due to that fact that I use dump to backup that partition , 
> and if you read that :
> http://dump.sourceforge.net/isdumpdeprecated.html
> it could be a good explanation . so do you confirm that I should move to :
> 
> define dumptype root-tar {
>    global
>    program "GNUTAR"
>    comment "root partitions dumped with tar"
> 
> 
> Anyway, if you have other suggestion , I'll appreciate, because today my 
> only solution is to move that backup from dump to tar . But will this 
> solve definitly my problem, will tar create other ones ? which (tar/dump 
> or soething else) is best finally ?
> 

You really think there is a "universal best"?  Tar has its own problems
including increased time of backup and inability to handle some extended
types of file attributes.

Do your client OS/filesystem combos support ext3 snapshots?
Some recent ones do?  If so, you could set things up to make a
snapshot just before the amdump, use dump on that non-changing
snapshot, then delete the snapshot after the dump.

-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
 JG Computing
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