Backing up whole system

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 09 May 2009, Craig White wrote:
>On Sat, 2009-05-09 at 11:28 -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
>> On Saturday 09 May 2009, GMS S wrote:
>> >What is the best and easy way to backup whole fedora 10?
>>
>> Since you picked two, best, easy, and cheap (as in free) being a given,
>> amanda installed from the tarball, NOT the rpms.  Easy might be relative
>> though as there is some setup and configuration to do before you assign it
>> all to the users crontab and forget it.  Trouble?  Subscribe to
>> amanda-users at amanda.org. This is industrial grade stuff, used by some
>> pretty big names.
>
>----
>I thoroughly disagree with this. The reason you use a package management
>system is to have readily packaged software so that you don't have to
>deal with all of the various issues created by installing from tarballs.
>
>Amanda is packaged by Fedora and if Gene feels that the packages are
>inadequate, he should be offering alternative packages for inclusion.
>
>Amanda is a PITA to set up and get running but so is Bacula, which is
>what I use these days. Any feature comprehensive backup program is a
>PITA to set up. But there is no reason not to use rpm packaging for
>either amanda or bacula.
>
>Craig

Sorry Craig, now you are walking on ground I am very familiar with, but 
fedora's rpm is/was incapable of handling the nuances of using only enough 
access rights to get the job done, a vital part of the amanda security model.

When an rpm package can build a complete user from scratch, and preserve the 
file rights exactly as they are when built from a tarball, then a 'pre-canned' 
version of amanda rpm's that works as well as the tarball might be possible.

But lets ask the rpm experts, which I am not that well versed in.

I don't believe it is with the current rpm packager but I'm open to correction 
since I haven't looked at the F10 packages other than to see they are old (to 
me that is, 2.6.0p2 is ancient).  I'm currently running the May 5th date 
snapshot of amanda-2.6.2alpha because I play the coal miners canary for amanda 
and have for years.  It works as expected, very well.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Where there's a will, there's an Inheritance Tax.