chattr

[Keyser Soze]

On Tue, 28 Jan 2003, Steven W. Orr wrote:
> I would enormously discourage you from using dd as a backup tool. The 
> result of doing that would be something that would contain all blocks in a 
> filesystem, regardless of whether thay are allocated or not. And a restore 
> operation would only  (almost) work on the original drive that the backup 
> came from. And you couldn't do a restore of a single file, only the whole 
> filesystem. And there's no way to query the backup for content. And you 
> wouldn't be able to restore on a system that didn't support ext2.
> 
> Common utilities are based on VFS. That's what makes them so common.



You are correct in the fact that dd copies all of the blocks in the
filesystem(gzip fixes this problem) and that you cannot restore onto a 
different filesystem type.

But you are incorrect with everything else.  You can query the backup for
content, you can restore single files, and you don't have to restore onto
the same disk - as long as the replacement disk of equal or greater size.  
I do these three things all the time with dd.  Let me know if you want to
see how.