OT: Linux EXT4 dump/restore equivalent?

[perryh at pluto.rain.com]

"Peter A. Giessel" <pgiessel at mac.com> wrote:

> What I have been completely unable to find is a linux boot disk
> that has a version of restore that supports ext4.

It's unclear to me how "a version of restore that supports ext4"
would differ from "a version of restore that supports UFS".

AFAIK restore (unlike dump) is FS-agnostic:  it must understand the
format of the dumpfile, but it needs no knowledge of how the FS is
represented on disk because it uses ordinary system calls (open,
write, etc.) to access the FS.

What you _do_ need on that recovery disk -- along with a generic
restore -- are ext4-aware versions of the kernel, fsck, mkfs, mount,
and (arguably) dump.

> I am very hesitant to use a backup scheme that doesn't have a
> clear recovery path.

+1