Re: backups/dumps/caches

[Alan Cox]

On Tue, 2002-08-06 at 21:54, Oliver Xymoron wrote:
> > 2. Perhaps, naively, is it possible to shut off
> >   caching temporarily (and without rebooting),
> >   accepting the performance hit, while a dump
> >   is done, and then restart caching afterwards?
> 
> Yep. Switch to single user mode, sync all filesystems, unmount them for
> good measure, dump, then switch back to multiuser mode.

If you are using 2.4.19 then the actual bug dump hits is sorted. Dumping
a live fs still will mean you end up restoring a not 100% consistent
state of one file versus another and of file data for a given file. You
have to weigh that against downtime. In most cases the downtime isnt
worth it for having a few files that are logged in a transient state.