Linux Backup Administration

[Mike McCarty]

I realize that this is off-topic. Hopefully you will forgive
me for imposing on you like this.

I'm new to *nix administration. I've used *nix installations
for years in various incarnations (Xenix, Solaris, HPUX et al.)
but not on the admin side. Backup is still something of a
mystery to me. It seems that there are two schools of thought

cpio
tar

It also seems that each side thinks the other side is nuts.
It also seems that using links (soft or otherwise) is not
well handled by either technique.
It also seems that everyone agrees that using tape is the
Way To Go(tm).

Can anyone tell me whether my impressions on this matter
be correct? Is there a good tutorial which can give me
relative pros and cons of cpio style vs. tar style backup?
How about which directories actually need backing up?
How about how does one actually recover when the worst
happens?
How about disc upgrades? I suppose that /etc/fstab needs to be
new, but /etc/hosts needs to be restored. How does one go
about doing these "partial" restores to get the machine
back running again?

I also don't want to use a tape drive, being (as some are)
on a restricted budget, both for time to learn new stuff
and monetarily, being among the Great Telecom Layoff. There
are very nice Windows programs which create initial/disaster
recovery CDs which can completely rebuild a system to the way
it was when initially created, and then do backups to CD after
that. *nix seems not to have any such concept.

Anyway, thanks for you time.

Mike

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