Re: Linus Torvald's opinion on Dump.

[Anthony A. D. Talltree]

>I've seen ads for the commercial and pricey backup packages from
>Syncsoft, Veritas and so on which claim no problems with live backups
>on *nix or NT. I suppose they have some way of write-locking files,
>copy to memory, then releasing the lock, but how could these utils
>work at the block rather than file level?

One way is to mirror the volume, then break off a mirror and back up
that.  Another is to use a volume snapshot, which on an active
filesystem may take rather a long time.