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Date:      Mon, 18 Dec 2000 12:07:10 -0800
From:      "Ronald F. Guilmette" <rfg@monkeys.com>
To:        Christopher Farley <chris@northernbrewer.com>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Backing up a file system... How do I preserve the file flags? 
Message-ID:  <13531.977170030@monkeys.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of Mon, 18 Dec 2000 13:44:04 -0600. <20001218134403.B27688@northernbrewer.com> 

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In message <20001218134403.B27688@northernbrewer.com>, you wrote:

>Ronald F. Guilmette (rfg@monkeys.com) wrote:
>
>> So how am I supposed to preserve them when making my full backups?
>
>man 8 dump

Nope.  I don't think this solves my problem, but maybe I should have been
more specific.

Here's what I would REALLY like to do...

I have two 4GB SCSI disk drives in one particular system I own.  The first
drive is full of Good Stuff[tm] that I want to mak backups of nightly.
The second drive is current empty of devoid of useful contents.

Assuming that I have already made a ufs filesystem on the target drive, I
would like to be able to have a nightly cron job that does a cpio copy
from one drive to the other and then have the other drive be something
that, at a moment's notice, I could boot up and run with (e.g. when and
if the first drive crashes).

But this doesn't seem to be something that is supported by dump(8).  The
man page seems to indicate that even if dump(8) is directed to place the
backup copy of your data onto a disk drive, that it will just be treating
that (output) disk drive as if it where just a tape drive:

     -f file
             Write the backup to file; file may be a special device file like
             /dev/rsa0 (a tape drive), /dev/fd1 (a floppy disk drive), an or-
             dinary file, or `-' (the standard output).  Multiple file names
             may be given as a single argument separated by commas.  Each file
             will be used for one dump volume in the order listed; if the dump
             requires more volumes than the number of names given, the last
             file name will used for all remaining volumes after prompting for
             media changes.  If the name of the file is of the form
             ``host:file'', or ``user@host:file'', dump writes to the named
             file on the remote host using rmt(8).  The default path name of
             the remote rmt(8) program is /etc/rmt; this can be overridden by
             the environment variable RMT.

This is not what I want.  I want the output device to be a disk drive, and
one with a live filesystem already on it.

I hope that I have made my desires more clear now.

Anyway, the only way I can see to do what I want to do is with something
like cpio (or maybe tar, but cpio is probably better for this sort of thing).
The only problems is that it looks to me like cpio will fail to copy over
the extra file flags. :-(

I wish there was a quick solution for that.


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