Dumps on an Active File System

[Mike Williams]

<>
A while back this subject was raised on the net. The general conclusion
to which people came was that on systems which dumped through the raw
disk interface (as does 4.1 BSD), dumps on an active file system should be
avoided. Can one dump and active file system on 4.2 BSD? I am sure that many
people have tried, but the big question is, has any one tried to restore 
a series of dumps from an active system?

Since we only have a TS-11 to which to dump, we usually do level 0
dumps by first copying the file system to be dumped to another free 
disk partition while the machine is in single user mode and then dumping to
tape from that partion (which is never mounted) with the system in multi user.
This saves a lot of down time. Maybe a reason for having a large number of 
small partitions?

Mike at erix.UUCP
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