Looking for backup software of complete system

[Kevin Wang]

If you have more than a few machines (pc and linux both) you may want
to look at bacula. It's architected like a real enterprise class
backup solution, and is designed to first buffer to disk and then to
some sort of offline device like cdr or tape.

tar can do incrementals by date, but that's not 100%.
tar doesn't handle hard links
cpio handles hard links ok
cpio has issues with large inode numbers. see also: afio

If you're doing backups, I'd take the time to bzip2 -9.

If you just want quick and dirty full backups (no incr), then I'd
point you at cpio|bzip2 -9>file and then copy the file to external
media.  I'd also keep a copy of the filenames inside the archive
handy, as when you uncompress to extract a single file, you need the
exact path and filename which you can't get from either cpio or tar.
only dump|restore has an interactive mode.

   - Kevin

On Sat, 9 Oct 2004 07:46:13 -0700, Rick Lim <ricklim at telus.net> wrote:
> 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.