Hi,
you have recognized this message was from 2001, yes?
shortly after linus message this has bee discussed here very deeply.
if you are interested in it, please go to the mailinglist-archives
and read the corresponding thread.
The result was more or less the folowing:
if you use dump the way it is designed to, you won't get in trouble
with its backups.

Christoph

Scott Phelps wrote:

I just stumbled over an email from Linus stating the following:
<< snip snip >>
"Note that dump simply won't work reliably at all even in 2.4.x: the buffer
cache and the page cache (where all the actual data is) are not
coherent. This is only going to get even worse in 2.5.x, when the
directories are moved into the page cache as well.

So anybody who depends on "dump" getting backups right is already playing
russian rulette with their backups. It's not at all guaranteed to get the
right results - you may end up having stale data in the buffer cache that
ends up being "backed up".

Dump was a stupid program in the first place. Leave it behind."
<< end snip >>

Read whole thing here:
http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/linux/linux-kernel/2001-16/1175.html

Anyhoo, I find myself currently using the Reiser filesystem, and I am now considering backing up critical config files and directories on my servers with tar and rebuilding them from scratch using XFS since that filesystem has a working version of dump ('xfsdump').

Any comments, advice? (Does Amanda even work with xfsdump/xfsrestore?

Thanks,

Scott Phelps