On Thu, 2010-11-18 at 11:32 -0500, William Stock wrote: > In a small test I had no problem burning some of "my" files and some > "root/root" files. However, using the CD for a restore would be a > gigantic pain in the backside. You'd be sitting in front of your > monitor forever. Yes. DVDs and CDs aren't great for lots of little files (really slow seek speed, slow read speed), but are reasonable for large files where the slow seek speed comes into the equation less often. And, depending on how you put the files on the disc, you'd have to correct all the changed ownerships, file permissions, and SELinux contexts. And you'd have to do it as root to be able to access all the files you want to backup, and the same when you restore them, later on. My suggestion about tarring (or otherwise archiving the files), puts all that ownership, permissions, and file context information within the archive, where it can be restored as the files are extracted. Though a gotcha with that, is people who backup their files, install a new system, create a new user by making the same username but not with the same numerical user ID, then try to restore their files. Generally speaking, the name is for your benefit, the filesystems go by the ID. Backups tend to be a multi-part methodology. Determine the files to be backed up, copy/archive them to a container, put that container file on some media. Then you have almost the reverse, for the restore process. Find the right media, find the right archive, find the files you want, restore them. Have a process to check for actual, rather than apparent, success (e.g. checksums, not just waiting for the file copy to finish). Without a plan for all of that, you're probably going to miss something vital, and not be able to do what you need to do. A typical mistake is to restore *all* files from your backup, over the top of a system, stomping over things that should be left alone (either files that were still okay, or erasing files created between the backup and the restoration). I had that happen to me when my webhost fiddled with their server, and without notifying me about anything. Wiped my site, restored an old backup, and the site stopped working. I had to change all the permissions of hundreds of files (their backup was obviously not a true backup), identify and restore missing or subsequently modified files, and force them to update the DNS records. The idiots sent the record date backwards (decremented the serial number, construed from a date), during their restore. And refused to see anything wrong with doing that. Any outside caches of the records wouldn't bother to update their records, since the serial number didn't *increment*. And, of course, they had the nerve to try and deny all of that. -- [tim@localhost ~]$ uname -r 2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686 Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists. -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
