[SunHELP] Backup Techniques / Scripts

[Sheldon T. Hall]

 Alex Flores writes ...

> I thought I read or someone might have told me that ufsdump requires the
> partitions to be unmounted.  Is this correct?  This box will be our
> mailserver and cannot afford to unmount anything.

Sun reccommends that you unmount partitions because of the way ufsdump
works, but nothing enforces this as a requirement.

ufsdump saves its table of contents and then the actual data, so ifg the
data changes after the TOC is saved, you might get inconsistent data, and
the files in question might not be restorable.

I've found it to be relatively safe when run on a mounted, but very quiet,
filesystem.

I believe that the later versions of Solaris (8 and 9, I think, but not 7)
get around the problem by taking a snapshot of the data and backing _that_
up.  Google "fssnap".

-Shel