XFS backup and restore from a remote host

To backup or dump an XFS file system, use the xfsdump utility. Centos supports backups to tape drives or regular file images, and also allows multiple dumps to be written to the same tape. The xfsdump utility also allows a dump to span multiple tapes, although only one dump can be written to a regular file. In addition, xfsdump supports incremental backups, and can exclude files from a backup using size, subtree, or inode flags to filter them.

install XFS dump

$ yum install xfsdump

Backup while running

Dump xfs local:

$ xfsdump -l0 -f /sda4_full_backup.xfsdump /dev/sda4

Dump xfs to a remote host:

$ xfsdump -l0 - / | gzip -c | ssh user@host dd of=/backup.dgz

Restore xfs from remote host:

$ ssh user@host "dd if=/somewhere/backup.dgz" | gunzip -c | xfsrestore - /mnt