(...)

quoted

Yes it is meant to handle a changing filesystem - you do see warning

msgs sometimes because

quoted

it can't see a particular inode anymore, which can happen as we do

multiple

quoted

scans of the inodes and if they get deleted then it obviously can't do

anything

quoted

with it anymore or if the inode is reused as a dir instead of a reg-file

etc...
Hmm,
I suppose he asked about something else:
Unless you use lvm snapshots (or something alike) you may get incorrect
files that are in use. Consider having 20GB file:
1. Dump starts reading the file
2. Dump is at 18th GB
3. You change the data in 1-5 GB region.
4. You have inconsistent data.

So after dump you get consistent filesystem but not necessairly
consistent data.

Yep, consistent FS is what I care about in the case of disaster.

Now, when I've tried to make non-interactive xfsdump I'vo got > prompt with
no action, like this
# xfsdump -f /data/backup2.file -L 'session1' -M 'media1" /

#

So, I've got to Ctrl+C the process.

Questions:
1) What could be the syntax problem in the above command?
2) Any examples for incremental xfsdump (non-interactive, i.e. run from
cronjob) would be very welcome (and also comments about xfsrestore from
these backups).

On the other hand, interactive xfsdump went fine:

# xfsdump -f /data/sysbackup.file /
xfsdump: using file dump (drive_simple) strategy
xfsdump: version 2.2.42 (dump format 3.0) - Running single-threaded

 ============================= dump label dialog
==============================

please enter label for this dump session (timeout in 300 sec)
 -> label1
session label entered: "label1"

 --------------------------------- end dialog
---------------------------------

xfsdump: level 0 dump of vod:/
xfsdump: dump date: Fri Feb 23 16:38:05 2007
xfsdump: session id: 53a70b7b-5114-41ae-9a82-6b2f3d0e394c
xfsdump: session label: "label1"
xfsdump: ino map phase 1: constructing initial dump list
xfsdump: ino map phase 2: skipping (no pruning necessary)
xfsdump: ino map phase 3: skipping (only one dump stream)
xfsdump: ino map construction complete
xfsdump: estimated dump size: 2053243392 bytes
xfsdump: /var/lib/xfsdump/inventory created

 ============================= media label dialog
=============================

please enter label for media in drive 0 (timeout in 300 sec)
 -> media1
media label entered: "media1"

 --------------------------------- end dialog
---------------------------------

xfsdump: creating dump session media file 0 (media 0, file 0)
xfsdump: dumping ino map
xfsdump: dumping directories
xfsdump: dumping non-directory files
xfsdump: ending media file
xfsdump: media file size 1503663968 bytes
xfsdump: dump size (non-dir files) : 1425357712 bytes
xfsdump: dump complete: 577 seconds elapsed
xfsdump: Dump Status: SUCCESS
vod / # ls -lh /data
total 1.5G
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1.5G Feb 23 16:47 sysbackup.file
#
#

Regards,

Olaf

--
Olaf Fr?czyk [off-list ref]

Best Regards,
Leon