On Fri, 2005-07-01 at 17:58 +0000, James Marcinek wrote: > 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 You can use almost any of the commercial snapshot products to restore almost any OS their is. Rsync is also a wonderful tool that will handle many requirements. I use rsync to backup Open Exchange's database and filespool in a smaller shop. In many cases and especially with postgres you could rsync a primary db to a backup db faster than any other methods. I didn't believe it till I tried it. Ted
