Rick Stevens wrote: > 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. While this and other things, are rattling around in the OPs head, one should also investigate and understand LVM snapshots. From a HOWTO that outlined the important bits.... "A wonderful facility provided by LVM is 'snapshots'. This allows the administrator to create a new block device which presents an exact copy of a logical volume, frozen at some point in time. Typically this would be used when some batch processing, a backup for instance, needs to be performed on the logical volume, but you don't want to halt a live system that is changing the data."
