--On Friday, August 17, 2007 8:56 PM -0400 Scott Ehrlich <scott at MIT.EDU> wrote: > I tried dump, which looked like it was working, but I have no idea what > files it was backing up, and couldn't find an option in the man page to > have it show me the files. I would have let it go, but since I couldn't > be sure about /mnt recusion, I opted out of it. dump is great. I've been using it since Red Hat 5.2. It doesn't back up through the filesystem. It backs up directly through the raw device, using the ext3 library. Because of this, it backs up one partition per invocation. If you want to back up more than one partition, you need to run dump multiple times, saving each dump file separately. Dump first saves partition-wide metadata, then the directories, then the files. It can optionally write helper files (quick file access, or QFA) to make it easy for restore to rapidly find a file in a restore operation even if your dump spans multiple tapes. (The QFA file records the seek points for each inode.) By default, dump saves the entire partition. You can mark files to exclude (using chattr) and with an appropriate command line switch dump will then exclude those files. Because dump uses the raw device and not the filesystem, it will also backup files hidden behind a mount point. This can make verify operations (using restore) confusing because restore *does* use the filesystem and won't be able to reach the files hidden behind mount points. But you do get an accurate representation of the real state of the partition. dump has its own support page and mailing list: <http://dump.sourceforge.net/>