Re: dump(8) lacks a last-stage incremental dump feature

[Greywolf <relayer%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 1:51 PM, David Holland
<dholland-current%netbsd.org@localhost> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 01:52:36AM -0800, Greywolf wrote:
>  > Once upon a time I bemoaned that dump(8) lacked the ability to do a
>  > "true incremental dump" once level 9 was reached.  You can start
>  > at 0 (full) and then just do 1..9 and have incremental backups, but
>  > the next 9 will be a differential.
>
> I'm not sure I understand exactly what you want, or the point - the
> intent of the dump levels scheme is that you can do 2^N nightlies
> before you need to do a level 0, but only keep N dumps around at any
> given time.

erm, if you want to do straight incrementals, no, you really can't do that.
Not everyone dumps 0 1 2 1 3 2.  Different people have different ideas about
what "the right solution" is.  Besides that, I think I do a level 0 once a year
and then do low-level [1234] throughout the year, and [5678] as weeklies,
as appropriate.

> However, doesn't your patch mess up /etc/dumpdates?

I fail to see how.  It simply dumps at level 9 but refers to the
previous level 9
for the requisite files, then updates /etc/dumpdates with this level 9.

This was how Solstice Backup handled it, and apparently it worked well.

If you could flesh this out a bit, I'd be glad to take it into consideration.
I thought I was on the right track with this, but it wouldn't be the first time
I was wrong about something, so I'm certainly open to discussion.

> --
> David A. Holland
> dholland%netbsd.org@localhost

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