another question about dump & restore

[Chris Torek]

In article <8158 at ncoast.UUCP> allbery at ncoast.UUCP (Brandon S. Allbery) writes:
>A file system is active if it's mounted.

Most people consider it active iff it is being written.

>It *is* possible to dump a mounted file system if you sync beforehand
>and make absolutely *certain* that nobody does *anything* on the
>filesystem -- even "echo /being-dumped/*" can screw things up, as the
>st_atime of the directory /being-dumped will be updated.

This is rather minor---you either get the old atime or the new atime,
since the atime does not cross a disk block boundary (assuming 512
byte sectors, or multiples thereof).

You can also dump a file system that is mounted read-only.  This is
often suitable for NFS servers.
-- 
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 454 7163)
Domain:	chris at mimsy.umd.edu	Path:	uunet!mimsy!chris