ext4 backup

I am in the process of installing 11.2 (X86-64). By default the root partition was formatted as ext4. I am also thinking of possibly using raid 1 for some partitions (disks). While doing some research for this I discovered an item that stated the dump package (dump restore) does not support ext4 and worse may appear to dump but not be able to restore. I can’t seem to find any reference to this in the openSUSE documentation. This has seriously broken my backup system.

I currently backup to external hard disks with a mixture of full backups of all partitions and incrementals. After a new full backup the old incrementals are deleted. In effect I keep 4 weekly full backups and then 1 in 4 or 5 to give monthly backups going back about 6 months.

Has anyone got any idea how this can be done with ext4 or should i move to another file system.

I have had a quick look at DAR but can’t find anything that about support for ext4. There seems to be people using rsync but that really isn’t a backup system. I think you would still need to backup an ext4 partition even if it was the rsync target and the restore is likely to be horribly complicated.

I do not particularly want to use partition cloning as this normally requires that you boot into another system to copy the partitions and it is often difficult or impossible to extract individual files.

If I understand correct you want to backup “live” system.
If so you can use dar. It archives directories and files and doesn’t depend on file system.

KDAR is a nice GUI front end for DAR. Currently not in the normal repositories but if you do a Webpin search you will find a copy and it seems to run fine here. It is nice for recovery and also you can have it output a DAR configuration that you can then use with the dar command perhaps in cron

Does anyone know about star? It handles acl and extended attributes.

On Novell’s Bugzilla is Bug 571841. I built e2fsprogs-1.41.10 and dump-0.4b42 RPMs. I did a test on two directorys (1G total) and had no issues with the restored files (as verified by diff).

Star works well and obtains ACL and XATTRs via the normal OS interface rather than relying on the underlying file structure. The con to this is one cannot access directories which are normally hidden by a mount (e.g., dev). There are options for a live file system as well as read-only checkpoints (as in LVM).