Why idle backups?? (was Re: Looking for shell script for backup on BSD 4.3)

[Steve Maraglia]

In article <3955 at awdprime.UUCP> tif at doorstop.austin.ibm.com (Paul Chamberlain) writes:
>In article <1642 at sirius.ucs.adelaide.edu.au> john at achilles.ua.oz (John Warburton) writes:
>>... we currently do our back ups at midnight each
>>night WITHOUT shutting down the system. Is this likely to cause problems with
>>restoring files??
>
>It's not exactly the same but I tend to see restoring this tape as
>being as risky as having hit reset at the time of the backup.
>

About 6 months ago we started performing backups of about 30 systems
( 1 Sequent, 1 Pyramid and the rest Suns) to an Exabyte tape drive,
there all performed at night from 11:00 p.m. to around 4:00 a.m.
while the file systems are mounted.

I've done dozens of restores from single files to entire partitions 
and have had zero failures.

I use the dump & restore utilities.

-- 
Steve Maraglia				   internet: srm at unify.com
Unify Corporation			   ..!{uunet,csusac,pyramid}!unify!srm
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