I suspect that the answer to that depends on what you are using as a backup medium. I have a tape robot and more tapes than I can ever possibly use, so it gets some use. Mostly for archives. Amanda is a pain, as it wants to fill tapes, so lots of tape changes to get as much on a tape as possible. Bacula is somewhat better, as long as you like config files. rsync to a NAS is my usual backup strategy and synching the NAS to another is my redundancy. The occasional dd to an external HDD from my laptop is also a hedge against disaster. In defence of dump, I used it relatively recently to virtualize a system that was on old hardware and not readily accessible. Other methods I tried failed. Restoring dump files to correctly sized virtual disks & LVMs on a new VM from a live distro made it an easy task. I suspect I could even turn that into a short topic talk for a future meeting if there is interest. > On Feb 22, 2018, at 10:33 AM, Robert P. J. Day <rpjday [ at ] crashcourse [ dot ] ca> wrote: > > > i'm prepping to teach 5 days of compTIA linux+ next week, after > which the students will have the option to write exams based on that > content for their LPI certification, so i'm working my way through the > course manual and just hit the section on backups, which opens with > explaining how to use "dump". argh. > > i understand that dump is ubiquitous, and that it integrates with > entries in /etc/fstab but, beyond that, does anyone seriously use dump > for official backups these days? > > i suspect i'll have to cover that utility to some extent, just > because it could conceivably be on the exam, so even if i consider > some of the course content utterly archaic, i still have to cover it. > > but what are folks out there using for their backups these days? > tar? rsync? amanda? the possibilities are endless, of course, but i'll > still cover dump, even as i strongly discourage people from using it. > > rday > > -- > > ======================================================================== > Robert P. J. Day Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA > http://crashcourse.ca > > Twitter: http://twitter.com/rpjday > LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday > ======================================================================== > _______________________________________________ > Linux mailing list > Linux [ at ] lists [ dot ] oclug [ dot ] on [ dot ] ca > http://oclug.on.ca/mailman/listinfo/linux