Re: Mounting a dump file

[Thor Lancelot Simon <tls%panix.com@localhost>]

On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 10:44:21AM -0400, Mouse wrote:
> 
> Another is to go entirely through the filesystem interfaces.  Programs
> like tar and pax do this; their major downsides are that they don't get
> sparse files entirely right and they usually can't help touching ctimes
> and/or atimes for files.

But that doesn't give you a consistent snapshot of the filesystem data
*at some particular point in time* either.  It's not really any better
than dump except that it doesn't require blowing holes in the security
model by allowing disks to be read out from under their filesystems
when the system's up multiuser.

The simple answer supported by the tools present in NetBSD is to use
dump's -x or -X option so you are dumping a snapshot rather than the
live filesystem.  If you can't live with the performance consequences
of that, then consider other approaches, would be my advice, but not
sooner.

Thor