For users of Fedora Core releases <fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I realize that this is off-topic. Hopefully you will forgive > me for imposing on you like this. > > I'm new to *nix administration. I've used *nix installations > for years in various incarnations (Xenix, Solaris, HPUX et al.) > but not on the admin side. Backup is still something of a > mystery to me. It seems that there are two schools of thought > > cpio > tar There are other open source solutions which can be used: AMANDA (www.amanda.org) Mondo (http://www.mondorescue.org/) > > It also seems that each side thinks the other side is nuts. > It also seems that using links (soft or otherwise) is not > well handled by either technique. > It also seems that everyone agrees that using tape is the > Way To Go(tm). > > Can anyone tell me whether my impressions on this matter > be correct? Is there a good tutorial which can give me > relative pros and cons of cpio style vs. tar style backup? > How about which directories actually need backing up? > How about how does one actually recover when the worst > happens? > How about disc upgrades? I suppose that /etc/fstab needs to be > new, but /etc/hosts needs to be restored. How does one go > about doing these "partial" restores to get the machine > back running again? > > I also don't want to use a tape drive, being (as some are) > on a restricted budget, both for time to learn new stuff > and monetarily, being among the Great Telecom Layoff. There > are very nice Windows programs which create initial/disaster > recovery CDs which can completely rebuild a system to the way > it was when initially created, and then do backups to CD after > that. *nix seems not to have any such concept. If you just want to make ISO's I would recommend using Mondo. You can make an image and restore to CD's and there's also a rescue disk for restoring, etc > > Anyway, thanks for you time. > > Mike
