On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 12:49 PM, Jean-Francois <jfsimon1...@gmail.com> wrote: ... > Not sure to understand the subtle of the man page explanations regarding the > dump of different nature of mount points. > > Just one additional information, the dump of higher levels work when I dump > /var but not /var/htdocs.
The key is the last sentence of this paragraph from the dump(8) manpage: files-to-dump is either a mountpoint of a filesystem or a list of files and directories on a single filesystem to be backed up as a subset of the filesystem. In the former case, either the path to a mounted filesystem or the device of an unmounted filesystem can be used. In the latter case, certain restrictions are placed on the backup: -u is ignored, the only dump level that is supported is -0, and all of the files must reside on the same filesystem. So, if you're not dumping an entire filesystem, then you always get a full (level 0) dump. (Why? At least part of the reason is that if you're not doing the full filesystem, inode ctime isn't sufficient to determine whether a file would be new to the dump.) Philip Guenther