Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!think.com!mintaka!bloom-beacon!eru!hagbard!sunic!mcsun!ukc!icdoc!sot-ecs!tjc
From: tjc@ecs.soton.ac.uk (Tim Chown)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: SUMMARY: Backup while in multi-user mode
Message-ID: <7747@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: 21 May 91 10:44:43 GMT
References: <1991May20.123129.14433@forwiss.uni-passau.de> <1991May20.204327.17694@erg.sri.com>
Organization: University of Southampton, UK
Lines: 18

In <1991May20.204327.17694@erg.sri.com> zwicky@erg.sri.com (Elizabeth Zwicky) writes:

>I have seen files come up missing; I have also seen someone do a full
>restore on a filesystem which fsck then deleted. If you cannot risk
>having a backup be bad, don't do it in multi-user. You can probably
>risk having your daily backups be bad. You probably can't risk all
>your backups. This is why many of us do some backups in multi-user and
>some in single-user. 

Another solution, if you are backing up user files and only have
a few hundred Mb to do overnight, is to simply backup with 'tar'
rather than 'dump'.  We use that method to do 300Mb of user files
from a Masscomp onto an Exabyte on a Sun and have never had a
problem - the tar takes nearly four hours (it would take less
on a local device).

	Tim
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