Backups allowing individual file restoration

[Les Mikesell]

On Sun, 2005-03-13 at 19:21, Gerry Doris wrote:
> I'm looking for an application that will create an image of a full Fedora 
> drive that can be used for either a bare metal restore or can be used to 
> restore individual directories or files.  I use Partition Image for this for 
> my Window boxes.

The ordinary unix/linux utilities (tar/cpio/dump) are capable of
complete restores of partitions.  If you want to do bare-metal
you just have to boot a run-from-CD distribution to create the
partitions with fdisk/mkfs yourself first.  This isn't particularly
difficult but it helps to check the layout of the original while
it is still working.  Then you have to run grub or lilo to make
the new install bootable.


> I don't want to use either CD's or DVD's.  I would like to backup/restore 
> either to another hard drive on the system being backed up or across my 
> network to a server.
> 
> Any reommendations would be appreciated.

My favorite is backuppc: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/.  It will
use compression and linking of duplicates to store 8-10x what
you would expect and has a nice web interface to extract files
or do restores.  However, while it can give you a tar image of
a partition over the network, you'll have to do the work mentioned
above to make bare metal boot.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com