Hi,

Andreas Micklei wrote on 2008-12-15 10:13:38 +0100 [Re: [BackupPC-users] 
Backing up the backup to an external USB drive]:
> Am Freitag, 12. Dezember 2008 schrieb Rich Rauenzahn:
> > Some of you running dd might want to consider "dump"
> > [...]
> 
> I have been doing that for about two years now. Works great!

I've been meaning to ask/point this out for some time now. Has anyone actually
tried *restoring* a dump of a *reasonably sized* pool? The reason I'm asking is
that as far as I understand the man page, restore runs completely in user
space, so it is faced with the same problem as cp/rsync/tar - the need to keep
an inode-to-path-name mapping for correctly re-creating hardlinks. It is
possible that restore can handle this problem, but I wouldn't take it for
granted without testing.

> It's just like dd, only faster and more space efficient. However you can
> only dump partitions, not the whole disk,

... and it's dependent on the file system, so you can dump ext2/ext3 file
systems (and maybe some others - with the specific dump program for that file
system, that is), but not necessarily *any* file system you might be using.
The fact that restore runs in user space may or may not mean that you can
restore to a different file system type. That would also be interesting to
know ...

> so I also save the output of fdisk -l, so I can recreate the partition table
> in case of disaster.

Why not 'sfdisk -d'? You should be able to feed that directly to 'sfdisk' to
recreate the partition table (which, of course, is most useful with an
identical target disk).

Regards,
Holger

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