7 Backing Up and Restoring an XFS File System

The xfsdump package contains the xfsdump and xfsrestore utilities. The xfsdump command examines the files in an XFS file system, identifies files that need to be backed up, and copies them to the storage medium. Any backups that you create by using the xfsdump command are portable between systems with different endian architectures. The xfsrestore command restores a full or incremental backup of an XFS file system. You can also restore individual files and directory hierarchies from backups.

Note:

Unlike an LVM snapshot, which immediately creates a sparse clone of a volume, xfsdump takes time to make a copy of the file system data.

Backups, known as dump sessions, are recorded in an inventory database at /var/lib/xfsdump/inventory. The inventory makes it easy to see what backups have been taken, at which points in time, and to which devices. You can view the inventory by either using the xfsdump -I or xfsrestore -I commands. To interactively prune the inventory, you can use the xfsinvutil -i command.

For more information, see the xfsdump(8), xfsrestore(8), and xfsinvutil(8) manual pages.

• Creating a Backup of an XFS File System
• Restoring an XFS File System From Backup
• Cloning an XFS File System