[geeks] Copy a linux disk

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Sat, 20 May 2006 @ 21:13 -0400, Nadine said:

> On 5/20/06, Jonathan C. Patschke <jp at celestrion.net> wrote:
> > <quote>
> >
> >    From:    Linus Torvalds
> [...]
> >    Dump was a stupid program in the first place. Leave it behind.
> >
> > </quote>
> >
> > I'm glad I run AIX, Solaris, and BSD.
> 
> And people say *Theo* is a troll. I guess Linus's fanboys keep the
> noise level high enough that people don't notice when Linus makes such
> ridiculous pronouncements.

Actually, it is better to say that it is a flaw of UNIX filesystems and
design that dump was ever necessary.

It goes below the standard UNIX API and filesystem interface to do its
work, it has little or no resistance to damage, and it isn't portable.

I wouldn't say it is a stupid program since is was so useful for years, but I
would love to say goodbye to it. It really doesn't work well for most of what
I do, and it has frequently let me down hard.

I think you should always be able to do full backups from userland, including
full meta information.

If you can't, then the abstraction is leaking heavily.

Unfortunately that is often true (and backup tools need improvement), which is
why we have dump in the first place. I would personally rather see the work
that goes into keeping dump working, go instead into better backup software
and meta information standardization.

I get around the need for dump by not depending on it for system recovery, and
I also save meta information with regular backups, and I even print some of it
out, at least things which are long-term and stable.

I find that with Linux and *BSD systems, installation is so easy, that really
I don't need dump anyway. I install my standard setup, restore the data, and
then patch the meta information as needed.

Not as convienient, but my backups are portable and more resistant to damage
than when I use dump.

Some work on standards for meta information in backup formats would go a long
way toward making dump unnecessary.




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shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["I want this Perl software checked for
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