Linux Backup Administration

[James Marcinek]

For users of Fedora Core releases <fedora-list at redhat.com> wrote: 
> 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

There are other open source solutions which can be used:

AMANDA (www.amanda.org)
Mondo (http://www.mondorescue.org/)

> 
> 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.

If you just want to make ISO's I would recommend using Mondo. You can make an
image and restore to CD's and there's also a rescue disk for restoring, etc

> 
> Anyway, thanks for you time.
> 
> Mike