Backing up whole system

Sun May 10 11:26:59 UTC 2009

On 9 May 2009 at 22:13, Robert L Cochran wrote:

Date sent:      	Sat, 09 May 2009 22:13:03 -0400
From:           	Robert L Cochran <cochranb at speakeasy.net>
To:             	"Community assistance, encouragement,
	and advice for using Fedora." <fedora-list at redhat.com>
Subject:        	Re: Backing up whole system
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> For just one or two systems I would use G4U by Hubert Feyrer ( 
> http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/ ) or G4L by Michael D. Setzer II (please see 
> his post in this thread.) I like to clone an entire hard disk and then 
> store the clone offsite.
> 

I concure that G4U is also good program, and have had some discussions 
with Mr. Feyrer, since there were some issues with the previous maintainers 
of G4L and him. I believe these have been resolved. I found the G4L project 
in a state, and was able to make updates since I had access to linux, but no 
NETBSD experience.

> I have not used G4L enough to gain real experience with it. I should try 
> to work with it enough to record a successful cloning action with G4L. 
> With that said, my impression is that G4U adapts a little better to many 
> but not all hardware setups. Hardware that G4U does not know about will 
> render it unbootable or unusable. And very often, if G4U doesn't work on 
> a given machine, G4L has trouble on it too. If both G4U and G4L do not 
> work for me on a given machine, I move the disk I want to clone to 
> another machine, and try to use G4U on that. If it seems to boot I go 
> ahead with the cloning action.
> 

The above is a little outside my experience. I've generally found that g4l 
supports hardware that g4u doesn't, at least with the later linux kernels. I 
have had a couple of users that had hardware that didn't work, and either 
adding modes to the kernel.org  kernels, or waiting till the support was added 
to the kernel. The g4l has many kernels on the iso, so that if the default 
doesn't work, the older ones might. So, not sure if the issues you referred to 
might be people that the default kernel didn't work, or later versions might.

> I really should try to use G4L more often, too.
> 

I wish I did have more users communicate. Generally get 8,000 or more 
downloads a month. 

> The up side of G4U/G4L is they both offer simple and quick cloning 
> action without going through the $%^& of setting up certain dedicated 
> backup software packages such as Amanda.
> 

The ease of using ftp or external usb devices to backup, and with later 
versions sshfs and cifs with the 0.30 versions. It also has the option of doing 
NTFSCLONE backups of ntfs partitions that are much faster than dd 
backups.

> The down side of using G4U is that if you try to clone drive A to an 
> external USB hard drive, the cloning action can take many hours. It is 
> not quick. I have insufficient experience with G4L to discuss its 
> performance.
> 

For the most part I see this as an USB 1 verses USB 2 support. Found that 
some P4 still had only USB 1, and about 1MB is the best you could get, with 
a USB 2 supprt it wasn't as fast as have an IDE connection.

> I also use scp to copy important files to a network drive and while this 
> is a backup, it is not an offsite backup. Very important difference. 
> There are businesses like Web Hosting Talk which admit they made severe 
> mistakes by not maintaining offsite backups. I should probably look into 
> doing that.
> 
> Even homes now generally have more than one computer. Multiple laptops, 
> one for each member of a family, are very common. I'd have to think 
> about an effective backup strategy for those cases.
> 
> For nontechnical users one simply cannot use complex backup solutions 
> though. I have enough experience to realize that. If the solution isn't 
> simple and automatic it won't be used. For technical users, the same 
> might apply, too, because tech people tend to be rather busy with tasks 
> other than backup and recovery. A backup solution really needs to be as 
> simple as turning a key.
> 

The biggest issue with G4L has been the outdated documentation, and I 
have 3 students working on updating the documentation, but they had little 
linux or scripting background, but have gotten use to running the program.

> Bob
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On 05/09/2009 09:15 AM, GMS S wrote:
> > What is the best and easy way to backup whole fedora 10?
> >
> > Thanks.
> > Fedora 10.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >    
> 
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