[Discuss] Dropping obsolete commands (Linux Pocket Guide) (dump/restore)

[Bill Bogstad]

On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 12:02 PM, Bill Bogstad <bogstad at pobox.com> wrote:

>
> I'm about to add an SSD to a system with an HD and I'm going to give
> "dump | restore" a try.
> One interesting feature of the Linux dump is that you can specify
> inodes not to backup and if it is a directory the whole subtree will
> not be copied.   The system in question has /, /var, and /home all on
> one partition and I'm going to split them up in the new configuration
> so this will be helpful.   /home is going to stay on the HD while / is
> moving to the SSD.  Not sure about /var yet.

Just an FYI, using "dump | restore" worked well fine for copying the
root  ext4 filesystem.   I started by installing the same OS version
on the SSD as I had on the HD drive (with seperate /boot and /
filesystems).   I then used a Live CD to copy the / from the HD to the
SSD  / partition. Since this didn't touch my kernels/grub install on
/boot, when I booted from the SSD it came up just fine with the copied
/ filesystem.   With some minor changes to the /etc/fstab file to get
the mount point right after the copy that is...

The HD decided to start developing bad blocks at that point and so I
ended up moving /home to a new hard disk using dump/restore as well.
I got about 55 Mbytes/sec throughput while copying a 560G /home
filesystem tree which I consider pretty good all things considered.

The source filesystems were either unmounted or mounted read-only
during the copies so I didn't need to worry about the live filesystem
concerns.

Bill Bogstad