Re: [ANNOUNCE] Ext3 vs Reiserfs benchmarks

[davidsen@tmr.com (bill davidsen)]

In article <20020716125301.GI4576@merlin.emma.line.org>,
Matthias Andree  <matthias.andree@stud.uni-dortmund.de> wrote:

| dsmc fstat()s the file it is currently reading regularly and retries the
| dump as the changes, and gives up if it is updated too often. Not sure
| about the server side, and certainly not a useful option for sequential
| devices that you directly write on. Looks like a cache for the biggest
| file is necessary.

Which doesn't address the issue of data in files A, B and C, with
indices in X and Y. This only works if you flush and freeze all the
files at one time, making a perfect backup of one at a time results in
corruption if the database is busy.

My favorite example is usenet news on INN, a bunch of circular spools, a
linear history with two index files, 30-40k overview files, and all of
it changing with perhaps 3.5MB/sec data and 20-50/sec index writes. Far
better done with an application backup!

The point is, backups are hard, for many systems dump is optimal because
it's fast. After that I like cpio (-Hcrc) but that's personal
preference. All have fail cases on volatile data.
-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
  CTO, TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.