backup strategies

[Eric Schuele]

Csaba Henk wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 31, 2005 at 09:40:16AM -0600, Eric Schuele wrote:
> 
>>How do snapshots work and how do they provide the consistency necessary 
>>for a dump?
> 
> [...]
> 
>>SoftUpdates are required on the filesystem.
> 
> 
> This sounds beautiful. I am amazed. I knew of softupdates, but they were
> always a shady corner of my understanding of BSD.
> 
> So live fs dumping is based on the great hackery of softupdates. Fine,
> but in this case... shouldn't the man page make a mention of it?

The online manual mentions it in 16.13.  Wouldn't hurt for it to be in 
the man page as well.

> 
> It just says that -L is ignored in case of unmounted/ro mounted fs-s,
> or if there is no proper .snap dir. But it doesn't say that it will be
> ignored if softupdates is not turned on...
> 
> Going a bit off: which OS-es provide this live snapshot dumping
> capability? FreeBSD? FreeBSD >= 5.x ? *BSD ? Maybe something else?

AFAIK FreeBSD 5.0+. Other *BSD as well, i believe... but someone else 
would have to answer that.

> (AFAIK, softupdates is supported also in other members of the BSD
> family, yet the NetBSD dump manpage didn't have such a -L flag...)
> 


-- 
Regards,
Eric