dump aborted due to /etc/dumpdates on read-only file system

[Bigby James]

On 03/28, Matthias Apitz wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I did a dump of the read-only root fs (in single user mode) and at the
> end it said:
> 
> ...
> DUMP: finished in 9837 seconds, throughput 3766 KByte/sec
> DUMP: cannot rewrite /etc/dumpdates: Read-only file system
> DUMP: The ENTIRE dump is aborted.
> 
> I know, I could have specified with -D ... another file, but I did not.
> The written dump file looks fine (I can read it with restore -t -f ...).
> 
> My question is: Is the dumpfile fine, despite of the above message.
> 
> Thanks
> 
> 	matthias

The dump file may be fine (I still too new to FreeBSD to say for certain), but
you may wish to  make another just to be safe. The dumpdates file is used to
record when a dump was made and which level was used for the dump, and so is
really only important if you want to make incremental backups. You can either
specify a different, modifiable dumpdates file with the '-D' flag if you want to
perform incremental backups, or just make full backups each time by excluding
the '-u' flag and a level specification when making the dump.

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