Re: State of dump utility

Christoph Hellwig
2020-10-02T12:15:42Z

On Tue, Sep 29, 2020 at 10:06:46PM -0400, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
> One of the interesting questions is how reliable the dump utility
> really is; that's because it works by reading the metadata directly
> --- while the file system is mounted. So it's quite possible for the
> metadata to be changing out from under the dump/restore process.
> Especially with metadata checksums, I suspect dump/restore is going
> much more unreliable in terms of the libext2fs returning checksum
> failures.

Before using a tool like dumpe2fs you'll need to do a fsfreeze,
and then everything should be fine. Best would be to patch the
tool to issue the freeze/unfreeze ioctls itself.