Re: UFS2 support?

[Oliver Fromme <check+ibcbd100rsuxipvu@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Christopher Weimann <cweimann@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
 > Snapshots are a big deal to me personally. Specifically I have an nfs
 > server with millions of files on it. Doing a full dump takes about 12
 > hours and a restore takes several days. This is dump is taking place
 > over gigabit ethernet to another server with a jumbo drive array and 
 > isn't being limited by the network.
 > 
 > With ufs2 and snapshots I expect to be able to just dd the snapshot in
 > no time flat but I haven't tried it yet.

Note that dd(8) probably works slower on a snapshot than on
a normal device, because the read access is not completely
sequential.  It is also worth noting that dump(8) now has a
-C option in FreeBSD 5, which tells dump that the filesystem
is read-only (which is the case with snapshots) and that it
is OK to cache blocks freely.  That improves performance of
dump considerably.

By the way, snapshots don't require UFS2.