-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 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) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFE+HbJpdyWzQ5b5ckRArudAKCLfTfnP22ddSOcg24PIdWB4QDq+QCfeW2E wcfp0/AKojEY7XOehRNnLms= =DyBB -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----