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 to get a consistent picture of an entire filesystem at any given moment in time.
The dump command sometimes can be very silent about open files and other problems, although it will complain with a “bread error” if things get really confused.
When files are skipped, restore actually can 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 do not have online indexes like those that are available with commercial utilities.[19]
As long as you keep these issues in mind, you can get by for a long time using dump and restore and avoiding having to spend anything extra for commercial software. Have fun!
[19] 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.
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