Looking for backup software of complete system

[Rick Lim]

My preferred method of backup would be to rewriteable CD ROM, not meaning to
start a flame war but with my experience of tapes,,,, they eventually wear
out, you always write over the same section of tape at the start and this is
the most likely failure point, not to mention stretch, size of media etc.

The criteria for the backup software is

1) Total OS and installed software backup of running system without taking
it offline
2) Preferable GNU
3) CD-RW back media
4) Either 'Boot and restore from media' or very little intervention to
restore.
5) EXT2 and EXT3 filesystems
6) Does not have to do incremental backup, a complete image is preferred.



-----Original Message-----
From: fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com [mailto:fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com]
On Behalf Of Mike Noble
Sent: Saturday, October 09, 2004 11:34 AM
To: For users of Fedora Core releases
Subject: Re: Looking for backup software of complete system

Rick Lim wrote:
> 
> 
> Hi there,
> 
> Could anyone recommend a backup software that would back up the whole 
> system, what I am looking for is much like Ghost for Linux but the 
> system has to keep running.
> 
> I am not worried about log files, this is the case where if the machine 
> fails then we are down for the period of time it takes to either build a 
> new OS disk and reinstall all of the custom programs and their numerous 
> quirks or grab the latest restore from the back media and just 'clone' a 
> new disk with all the programs setup.
> 
>  
> 
> What I have tried in the past is to clone the harddisk using the 
> harddisk upgrade howto method, but that involves taking the machine 
> completely offline, also cutting an image with Ghost means taking the 
> machine offline.
> 
>  
> 
> Thanks.
> 

Depending on the file system that you have(ext2,ext3....)
I would recommend dump or cpio. If you have a tape drive
attached (lets say /dev/st0) you can use the following
dump command:

dump 0uf /dev/st0 /

This will dump the entire contents of the / file system
to the tape drive.
You can then restore from tape with the command restore.
Restore has a flag 'i' which tells it to use interactive
mode so that you can choose individual files if needed or
'x' which says to restore everything.

restore if /dev/st0 (interactive mode)
or
restore xf

The flag 'f' stands for file/device, this means that you
can also dump to a file if needed (just replace /dev/st0
with the name of the file you wish to dump to.

dump can also be used to to incremental backups as well.
dump 2uf /dev/st0 /  will backup only those files which
have changed since the last level 0.  The number can be
anything from 0-9.  Any number higher than 0 will backup
files changed since the last lower number backup.

Mike
-- 
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Registered Linux User #362275	http://counter.li.org

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