backup of my / filesystem

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 12:53 PM, Kevin Kempter
<kevin at kevinkempterllc.com> wrote:
> I'm looking for a clean way to backup my laptop in part so before I apply
> any updates I have a clean backup to revert to if needed.
>
> I have a / and /home filesystems in order to backup before I run a set of
> updates from yum I suspect I need to backup / separately this way I dont
> need to restore my 22Gig of documents in /home if an update breaks
> something.
>
> In the past I've gone onto single user mode and used dd to backup my HD
>
> I wonder if running tar with the proper flags to ensure the following would
> be as effective
>
> 1) restrict tar to the current(/) filesystem (i.e. disallow it from going
> off into /home)
>
> 2) ensure that tat picks up all the dot files
>
> 2 questions:
>
> 1) is the above tar scenario sufficient to protect me from yum update
> changes?
>
> 2) anyone have suggestions per specific tar commands that will do the
> operations specified above?

I wouldn't use dd for backups unless you wanted to restore an exact
bit-by-bit image of an entire filesystem.

I've found rsync to be very effective, with the important advantage
that you can run the backup several times and it will only copy what
changed between one copy and the next. The rsync man page gives
several examples of this. You might also be interested in rsnapshot,
which basically wraps crontab scripts around rsync and can keep
multiple time-related snapshots without wasting disk space.

poc