Rick Lim wrote:
My preferred method of backup would be to rewriteable CD ROM, not meaning to
start a flame war but with my experience of tapes,,,, they eventually wear
out, you always write over the same section of tape at the start and this is
the most likely failure point, not to mention stretch, size of media etc.
The criteria for the backup software is
1) Total OS and installed software backup of running system without taking
it offline
2) Preferable GNU
3) CD-RW back media
4) Either 'Boot and restore from media' or very little intervention to
restore.
5) EXT2 and EXT3 filesystems
6) Does not have to do incremental backup, a complete image is preferred.
-----Original Message-----
From: fedora-list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx [mailto:fedora-list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Mike Noble
Sent: Saturday, October 09, 2004 11:34 AM
To: For users of Fedora Core releases
Subject: Re: Looking for backup software of complete system
Rick Lim wrote:
Hi there,
Could anyone recommend a backup software that would back up the whole
system, what I am looking for is much like Ghost for Linux but the
system has to keep running.
I am not worried about log files, this is the case where if the machine
fails then we are down for the period of time it takes to either build a
new OS disk and reinstall all of the custom programs and their numerous
quirks or grab the latest restore from the back media and just 'clone' a
new disk with all the programs setup.
What I have tried in the past is to clone the harddisk using the
harddisk upgrade howto method, but that involves taking the machine
completely offline, also cutting an image with Ghost means taking the
machine offline.
Thanks.
Depending on the file system that you have(ext2,ext3....)
I would recommend dump or cpio. If you have a tape drive
attached (lets say /dev/st0) you can use the following
dump command:
dump 0uf /dev/st0 /
This will dump the entire contents of the / file system
to the tape drive.
You can then restore from tape with the command restore.
Restore has a flag 'i' which tells it to use interactive
mode so that you can choose individual files if needed or
'x' which says to restore everything.
restore if /dev/st0 (interactive mode)
or
restore xf
The flag 'f' stands for file/device, this means that you
can also dump to a file if needed (just replace /dev/st0
with the name of the file you wish to dump to.
dump can also be used to to incremental backups as well.
dump 2uf /dev/st0 / will backup only those files which
have changed since the last level 0. The number can be
anything from 0-9. Any number higher than 0 will backup
files changed since the last lower number backup.
Mike
I agree that CD ROM is nice, but the size of CD ROM limits
the amount of data that can be put onto the CD ROM. I
personally use a second disk drive and write my backups to
it. The chances of losing both disk drives is rare. I
can get a drive with over 100Gb of space for about $100
and can be used over and over again. Files that I really
need to keep forever are written to CD ROM, but these are
more like my resume and such which do not take up a lot of
space. The OS is only backed up for disaster recovery and
I do not care much about going way back in time. I can not
even fit my Mail directory onto a CD ROM.
DVD ROM is better, but still does not have enough space
to fit everything on on DVD. And I am not aware of any
backup software that allows you to span CD or DVD ROM's.
Mike
--
Usenix member http://www.usenix.org
Sage member http://www.sage.org
Registered Linux User #362275 http://counter.li.org
