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On Fri, Sep 01, 2006 at 06:54:16PM +0100, John Masters wrote:

Hi.

I am running CentOS 4.3 on a small home server just dishing up mail, music etc. to the household. I had been doing irregular backups to a 160GB USB external drive /dev/sda1 mounted as /mnt/backup using tar. Then I read somewhere that dump was better so I tried that after clearing the drive (formatted as ext3).

dump -0u -f /dev/sda1 /shared took a while to finish but gave no errors however ls showed no files and df -h showed /dev/sda1 to be 4.4T in size and 100% full.

I've looked at the man pages but I must be missing something!

Okey, that was a BAD idea. You should never use dump directly to any device other than a tape drive (-f /dev/sda1), unless you are doing a 1x1 filesystem copy (dump -0u -f /dev/sda1 /dev/sda2), and then only when both filesystems are identical (size etc).

If you want to dump to that disk, you have 2 basic options:

dump -0u -f - /shared | ( cd /mnt/backup | restore -xf - )

This will recreate the complete file structure, and might not be what you want. The other option is:

dump -0u -f /mnt/backup/dump.XXXXX /shared

Creating a dump file dump.XXXXX

- -- Rodrigo Barbosa "Quid quid Latine dictum sit, altum viditur" "Be excellent to each other ..." - Bill & Ted (Wyld Stallyns)