Thomas E Dukes wrote:
Hello,
I have been using mondorescue to backup to dvd for several months now without any problems.
Since upgrading to Centos 4.4, I now receive a few errors. The errors are for files in /var/named/chroot/proc. I guess these files change so when I do a differntial backup they aren't there and result in errors. (Never got any errors before and I think these files were there in 4.3) If I exclude the files from the backup, no errors.
My question is what, if any problems would I run into not backing these files up and having to do a complete system restore?
Take care with what you backup; there is _no_ point in backing up any of the kernel's pseudo-filesystems including proc.
Also, take care using mondo; the last two times I looked at it, the code was horribly trusting of information the user provided; the first time it could easily be provoked to SEGV errors.
The second time, I contented myself with picking out some of the source code that I thought looked a but sus (I'm not much of a C programmer, and at my age I don't care to add it to my resume). People much more export than I (including Debian/Ubuntu developers) agreed with my appraisal. Worse, when I took it up with the author the first time, he denied flatly there was a problem, and claimed "It's not a backup tool, it's a disaster-recovery tool."
It's a shame, because there's much to commend the basic idea.
Take a look at DAR, it provides similar capability. It can be found at sf.net, and probably one or more of the extras repos.
If there is a fan of mondo here who's a capable C programmer and who understands secure programming, I suggest you audit the code. Mondo needs it.