single user while dumping

[Jim Knutson]

Don't judge the amount of time it takes to do a level 0 in single-user
mode by the time it takes in multi-user mode.  Multi-user mode dumps can
often take 4 to 8 times as long to finish depending on how busy the
machine is.  Servers are often busy resulting in disk contention between
the dump program and file service daemons.

Also, depending on your situation, you might want to consider doing a
level 0 once a month in single-user mode and the weekly dumps as level 1
in multi-user mode.  This should give you enough coverage to recover from
catastrophic disk failure with a clean level 0 as well as file retrieval
from the multi-user dumps.

Jim Knutson
knutson at mcc.com
cs.utexas.edu!milano!knutson