[Discuss] Dropping obsolete commands (Linux Pocket Guide)

[Rich Pieri]

On 11/10/2015 11:24 AM, Chuck Anderson wrote:
> "It does read the mounted block device directly, and so it's certainly
> not a _recommended_ way to back up your ext4 filesystem.

First part is true. Second part does not necessarily follow from the first.

This is the open file "problem" that dump has had with every file system 
ever. If dump is dumping the blocks associated with a file and that file 
is changed during this process then the backup will have an incomplete 
file. The fault isn't in dump; it's that the file system was in use when 
dump was run. Using LVM snapshots to freeze dump targets is one way to 
make this problem go away.

-- 
Rich P.