[CentOS] OT - backup question/advice
John Summerfied
debian at herakles.homelinux.org
Wed Sep 6 05:43:36 UTC 2006
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.
--
Cheers
John
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