Looking for backup software of complete system

[Mike Noble]

Rick Lim wrote:
> 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

I agree that CD ROM is nice, but the size of CD ROM limits
the amount of data that can be put onto the CD ROM.  I
personally use a second disk drive and write my backups to
it.  The chances of losing both disk drives is rare.  I
can get a drive with over 100Gb of space for about $100
and can be used over and over again.  Files that I really
need to keep forever are written to CD ROM, but these are
more like my resume and such which do not take up a lot of
space.  The OS is only backed up for disaster recovery and
I do not care much about going way back in time.  I can not
even fit my Mail directory onto a CD ROM.

DVD ROM is better, but still does not have enough space
to fit everything on on DVD.  And I am not aware of any
backup software that allows you to span CD or DVD ROM's.

Mike
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