support quality (Re: dump | restore fails: unknown tape header type 1853384566)

[Daniel O'Connor]

On Thursday 26 March 2009 19:55:04 Peter Jeremy wrote:
> On 2009-Mar-25 19:25:28 +1030, Daniel O'Connor <doconnor at gsoft.com.au> 
wrote:
> >One other thing would be to make absolutely sure that your version of dump
> > & restore are in sync, the are very machine/version dependent.
>
> Actually, they aren't - the archive format is very stable.  (This is a
> fairly important requirement - you don't want to suddenly be unable to
> restore your backups after an upgrade).  I can restore dumps made on
> FreeBSD4.8/i386 and FreeBSD4.9/alpha on a FreeBSD-current/amd64 system
> without problems.

Hmm interesting.. I must confess I haven't had problems recently but I tend to 
use tar these days anyway since it's more portable.

> It's possible that you might have problems with a backup made using a
> very recent dump on a very old restore if you've used filesystem
> features that didn't exist when that restore was built.

Could be, too long ago to remember :)

-- 
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C

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