backups--a cautionary tale and two questions

[dsr at tao.merseine.nu]

On Sun, Oct 30, 2005 at 08:30:37PM -0500, Seth Gordon wrote:
> (1) The cron job does not unmount partitions before dumping them.  What
> are the consequences of this?  (If the only consequence is "every once
> in a while some process will be modifying a file on a partition while
> it's being dumped, and that file will not be backed up or that dump will
> be aborted", I can live with that.)

Yes, unless you are running a database, in which case you are
likely to never get a consistent dump of the DB. Halt or
snapshot the DB and use the appropriate tool.

-dsr-