Re: [Dump-users] Corruption of recently-modified file contents

[Ben H. <bj...@ca...>]

On Wed, 7 Feb 2007, Peter Münster wrote:

> I think, it's expected, since you use dump on an active file-system.

So it would appear.  It looks like dump actually calls BLKFLSBUF itself, 
so the problem only occurs when dump isn't running as root.

> How to deal with it:
> - you can mount the file-system read-only during the dump

This doesn't help.  Without the BLKFLSBUF, the dump is still inconsistent.

> - you can use the snapshot feature of LVM (that's what I do, very nice)

That looks like by far the best solution.  Unfortunately, not all of my 
users use LVM at the moment.

Meanwhile, I think <http://dump.sourceforge.net/isdumpdeprecated.html> 
really ought to be updated a little, since the following statements are 
now untrue:

"you can safely use dump on ... read-only filesystems."

"You can also safely use dump on idle filesystems if you sync before 
dumping"

-- 
Ben Harris, University of Cambridge Computing Service.  Tel: (01223) 334728