Looking for backup software of complete system

[bryan at redfedora.co.uk]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Rick Lim" <ricklim at telus.net>
To: "'Filippos Klironomos'" <PresarioD at gmail.com>; "'For users of Fedora 
Core releases'" <fedora-list at redhat.com>
Sent: Saturday, October 09, 2004 8:28 PM
Subject: RE: Looking for backup software of complete system


The backup/restore device would be a CD-Rom drive, using the DVD or CD rom
with your method how would you do a complete restore to a totally new
harddrive, not even formatted properly, which could be the case.

-----Original Message-----
From: fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com [mailto:fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com]
On Behalf Of Filippos Klironomos
Sent: Saturday, October 09, 2004 12:15 PM
To: For users of Fedora Core releases
Subject: Re: Looking for backup software of complete system

>
> 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.
>

So I am not sure what your resources are, but it seems that all of the
answers you've gotten up to now presuppose that you have some sort of
tape drive or hard disk that you will 'dump' your filesystem on. If on
the other hand you don't have such a resource then compression is an
issue.

I use the good old:

tar --exclude /tmp --exclude /home/tmp czpPf <tar-ball-file-name> /

to backup my laptop and then burn the tar-balls on DVD. I had to do a
system restore once and from the mounted DVD you just do:

tar xzpPf <tar-ball-file>

and you are done. In one single DVD I can fit four system backups (one
every month) but of course the process is slower when reading from the
DVD so usually I keep a copy of the last backup tar-ball on the disk.

F.

-- 

You could check out mondo rescue - I tried it at work and it seems to do 
exactly what you're asking for.

Bry