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

[Alain Brossard EPFL-SIC/SII]

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.
> 

	In theory, there is a risk if directory affecting operation
are done just at the wrong time (between passes of dump), but in
practice I have never heard of an actual problem occuring.  If you
can't take that small/really tiny risk then go to single user mode.
Otherwise, in practice, you most probably will never see a failure,
especially if you do your dump overnight.  At the U. of Waterloo,
we used to do our dump (level 0) during the daytime (6-8 hours!)
and we never had a failure in the three years I was there.  And
that machine was heavily used (Computer Graphics...:-).
-- 

Alain Brossard, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne,
	SIC/SII, EL-Ecublens, CH-1015 Lausanne, Suisse
brossard at sasun1.epfl.ch