Fwd: Remote backups using ssh and dump

[Jerry McAllister]

On Fri, Apr 04, 2008 at 05:00:01PM -0400, John Almberg wrote:

> >
> >Little did I know, when I posted this question, that I would  
> >receive such a wealth of information.  I'm deeply appreciative of  
> >the community's willingness to share information and thank each and  
> >every one of your for your contributions.
> >
> >Now I have some reading to do.  :-)
> >
> >
> 
> I think there is a difference between what dump does and what tar/ 
> rsync do... I like the idea of doing a bit level backup, rather than  
> a file level backup.
> 
> If you've never done a dump, try it locally, and then try restore,  
> particularly interactive restore (restore -i). It's pretty cool and I  
> don't think tar or rsync have anything like it.

Although some of the aspects of using dump/restore are a little clunky,
it is still superior to any other method of backing up whole file systems.
One of its weaknesses is that it will only back up a file system and
not a subset of one such as one directory tree.  You can, though, restore
individual files and directory trees easily.

What dump gets you is a system that knows how to handle every type
of file condition correctly.   None of the other quite do that.

Its other weakness is that it is filesystem/OS specific.   Geneally,
you cannot take a dump on one OS and restore it under a different on - 
like you cannot dump SunOS and restore on FreeBSD or whatever.

It will work over networks, though that can be slow and it doesn't
recover well from network errors/failures.

////jerry

> 
> -- John
> 
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