Dump for Backups

This was originally posted on my family blog on 4/10/06. I will be slowly moving the geeky stuff from there to this blog.

Not willing to wait any longer (two whole days already!?!) for a fixed mondo rpm, I tried to compile it myself. No luck, make complained about no target for the man pages or something. So in the meantime, I'm looking at good ol' dump. It looks kind of handy, and I think I could get it to almost do what mondo promises with a little scripting. It wants to backup whole filesystems. It will do a sub-directory, but if you do that it won't do differentials. You can have it exclude files and directories, but you have to supply it the inode numbers of what you want it to exclude. Apparently a simple file or directory name isn't good enough for dump, you have to use stat yourself. Also, it won't split the backup file up like mondo, unless it runs out of tape. That means that if you are backing up to CDs, you'd have to manually use split and mkisofs to get ready to burn.

Here is the test backup command I'm running right now (bzipping with level 9 is very slow on my box, remind me not to do that again):

dump -j9 -0af /mnt/home/backup2/dump-test /home/bryan/Documents

OK, finally finished. It's simple to restore stuff:

restore -ia -f /mnt/home/backup2/dump-test

It starts a little shell, you can use 'cd' and 'ls' to see what's been backed up. You then use 'add' to add files to the extraction list. An 'ls' will then put a star next to the files and directories to be extracted. When you are all ready type 'extract' and it extracts to the directory you were in when you typed the above command. Then 'q' to quit. Not bad.

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