On Mon, 2007-12-03 at 10:15 +0100, craigni wrote: > Thanks to all who answered my access F7 from F8 system question. Unfortunately, since I am in the habit of unplugging all of my drives but one to fresh install an OS, I don't think I can access the systems from one another. But the responses were highly informative. > > Here's the question I must ask (and I cringe while I do, because I've been searching the web for weeks for a good response, and really have not come up with something yet, yet feel that I should have.) > > I want to back up my F8 system so restoring it will be as easy as possible in the event of a major system screw up (which over the years, I have done many times.) I do not want to use a commercial product on the Linux side. I've been using dump/restore, which does not work well for a full system restore. In my searches on the web over the last couple of weeks, I read that dump was deprecated, and why. But in the past, when I tried to use a simple tar, I haven't had luck in restoring the entire system. So here are my questions: > > 1. Does anyone have a good script that backs up a F8 (I would think F7 would be highly similar here) system so that a *full system restore* is relatively straightforward? > > 2. Can you access individual files in it as you would restore -if ? > > 3. Would the strategy of the restore be something like boot from the rescue disk, change to the system disk, and then tar -xf ... ? > > 4. What exactly *are* the root directories that must be backed up? If SELinux was set to enforcing, would it conflict with the restore? > > Thanks for entertaining this very stoopid question. I just don't have a good simple way to back up and restore my Linux systems, and it is the last remaining obstacle to pretty much completely switching over to Linux as my primary OS (except of course, the 10 minutes a day I need to access iTunes, but that's another, and very annoying story.) It rather depends on what your backup media is. I've used cpio successfully in the past. Amanda is also popular and works. Bacula (http://www.bacula.org/) is also very popular. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- - Rick Stevens, Principal Engineer rstevens@xxxxxxxxxxxx - - CDN Systems, Internap, Inc. http://www.internap.com - - - - If Windows isn't a virus, then it sure as hell is a carrier! - ----------------------------------------------------------------------
