Section 3.6. Limitations of dump and restore

3.6. Limitations of dump and restore

dump and restore have many capabilities. A good shell script can automate their use and can provide a very good safety net for that time when your disk goes south. However, these utilities do have their limitations:

• There is no way with dump to get a consistent picture of an entire filesystem at any given moment in time.

• The dump command is sometimes silent about open files and other problems, although it complains with a "bread error" if things get really confused.

• When files are skipped, restore can actually make you think they are on the volume.

• You do need to write scripts to work with dump, and scripts can have errors.

• There are multiple versions of dump, not all of which play well with one another.

• Like all native utilities, dump and tar lack online indexes like those available with commercial utilities. (Solaris's version of dump does have an a option that performs some level of indexing, but it definitely isn't the same as what you'd get with a commercial product.)

As long as you keep these issues in mind, you can get by for a long time using dump and restore and avoid spending anything extra for commercial software. Have fun!