Hi. I've been using dump for a while, to backup all the filesystems from a
server.

This server is always online, gathering data, so there is information being
written all the time (especially in /var filesystem).



I have always made my backups while running the server in runlevel 3, with
all filesystems mounted, but last time I tried to restore /var there was an
error, and lots of files were lost. I believe this was because files were
being changed as the backup was being made.



I'm not using LVM, so I can't take advantage of LVM snapshots. Is it any way
I can make my backups in a reliable safe way, without going into runlevel 1
and unmounting all filesystems?



The dump command in FreeBSD has a -L flag for this (dumping a live
filesystem), but my version of dump doesn't (Fedora Core 4 - dump 0.4b40).

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=dump
<http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=dump&sektion=8> &sektion=8





Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.



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