The following is my original post.
>
> Is it possible to dump more than one filesystem at a time using the "dump" com>mand?
>
Thanks to all 19+ people who took the time to help me out with this problem.
A few directed me to read the manual. I did this before posting. I read the man page as well as parts of several Sys. Admin. books.. The reason I posted is because I could not find an answer that did not leave a bit to the imagination. Imagination is good at times but when upgrading production machines it is very expensive.
Thanks to Syed Zaeem Hosain for the following directive.
>SYNOPSIS
> /usr/etc/dump [ options [ arguments ] ] filesystem
> /usr/etc/dump [ options [ arguments ] ] filename ...
>
SNIP
>
>You can see the single "filesystem" mentioned above, but there are
>ellipsis after the "filename" signifying multiple filenames.
^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Syed was not the only person to suggest this idea but was the only one who made it 100% clear.
The form of this command is:
dump [options] /dev/nrst? /dev/sd0a /dev/sd0g ect.
This form uses the non-rewinding device and dumps two or more filesystems from the same command line.
Most of the replies I recieved suggested a command in the form of:
# dump [options] /dev/nrst? /dev/sd0a
# dump [options] /dev/nrst? /dev/sd0g
Where the archive devices used is again the non-rewinding device and the commands are issued without rewinding the tape.
Both forms of the dump command creates seperate files on the archive media with a tape mark in between for each filesystem dumped.
Recovery for this data uses the 's' option of the restore:
# restore -ifs /dev/nrst0 2
or
# mt -f /dev/rmt/0n fsf 2 ; restore -if /dev/nrst0
Both of these commands will get you to the second file on an archive media to be able to restore interactively from it.
Yves Hardy writes about a third option:
> What you can do for example is to mount the partition number 2
>(for SunOS : /dev/sd0c or for Solaris : /dev/dsk/c0t3d0s2) and there you will
>be able to make a full dump of your disk, because, by default, the partition
>number 2 is contains all the data of your different file system.
The only drawback I see to this idea is that it will dump the whole disk drive. I wanted to dump "/" and "/usr" only to have a redundant backup of volatile files for OS upgrading.
Probably the best advice I got was "Check your backup before you need it."
Thanks again to everyone who tried to help out.
Jeff Greer
jeff@datapage.com
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