[Discuss] Dropping obsolete commands (Linux Pocket Guide)

[cra at WPI.EDU (Chuck Anderson)]

On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 12:06:03PM +0000, Edward Ned Harvey (blu) wrote:
> If you want to backup the entire filesystem in such a way that all the above is unnecessary - you instead boot from rescue media, partition & format the hard disk, and simply run "restore" and boot back into the restored system as if no problem had ever occurred, then assuming you're using ext filesystems, you need dump & restore. (Or you need storage on some snapshotting storage system external to the system you're restoring.)

According to Ted Ts'o (filesystem developer), it is NOT a recommended
way to backup your filesystem:

http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/linux/kernel/1197768

"It does read the mounted block device directly, and so it's certainly
not a _recommended_ way to back up your ext4 filesystem. It should
work, though, since it just uses the high-level libext2fs functions
--- and a while back, I think I did a quick test and found that it
really did work. So I'm not sure what broke, but it might not be that
hard to fix. That being said, it may not be worth it to fix it, since
with delayed allocation, backups using dump will be even more
unreliable than they were before. " - Ted Ts'o