On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 9:39 AM, Scott Robbins <scottro at nyc.rr.com> wrote: > On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 09:03:13AM -0400, Robert Heller wrote: >> At Tue, 14 Sep 2010 13:12:46 +0100 CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org> wrote: >> > >> > Is there a document with instructions for this? >> > I've had smartd warnings that a hard disk in my server is sick, >> > so I am installing a new drive (in addition to the old). >> >> Here is an article I wrote about doing this: >> >> http://www.deepsoft.com/2009/01/how-to-transfer-a-linux-system-from-one-disk-to-another/ > > As someone who came from FreeBSD, dump restore was always considered > best there. Hoewver, I've heard (though not deeply investigated), that > due to various things in the Linux kernel, dump restore isn't the best > approach for Linux, and there will be metadata loss. DISCLAIMER--this > isn't something I've really looked into, however last time I was going > to do it, I saw enoughw warnings about it to make me look for another > method. If Robert has been doing it successfully, then, chances are > he's right. (Perhaps these changes in the Linux kernel are newer than > the CentOS kernel.) FWIW, I only use dump/restore on unmounted or mounted read-only filesystems There was the email below (old, I know, but probably the source of the "dump restore isn't the best approach for Linux" thought): From: Linus Torvalds To: Neil Conway Subject: Re: [PATCH] SMP race in ext2 - metadata corruption. Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 09:59:46 -0700 (PDT) Cc: Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel At vger Dot kernel Dot org> [ linux-kernel added back as a cc ] On Fri, 27 Apr 2001, Neil Conway wrote: > I'm surprised that dump is deprecated (by you at least ;-)). What to > use instead for backups on machines that can't umount disks regularly? Note that dump simply won't work reliably at all even in 2.4.x: the buffer cache and the page cache (where all the actual data is) are not coherent. This is only going to get even worse in 2.5.x, when the directories are moved into the page cache as well. So anybody who depends on "dump" getting backups right is already playing Russian roulette with their backups. It's not at all guaranteed to get the right results - you may end up having stale data in the buffer cache that ends up being "backed up". Dump was a stupid program in the first place. Leave it behind. > I've always thought "tar" was a bit undesirable (updates atimes or > ctimes for example). Right now, the cpio/tar/xxx solutions are definitely the best ones, and will work on multiple filesystems (another limitation of "dump"). Whatever problems they have, they are still better than the _guaranteed_(*) data corruptions of "dump". However, it may be that in the long run it would be advantageous to have a "filesystem maintenance interface" for doing things like backups and defragmentation.. Linus (*) Dump may work fine for you a thousand times. But it _will_ fail under the right circumstances. And there is nothing you can do about it.