What backup software?

[Dotan Cohen]

2008/8/11 Smoot Carl-Mitchell <smoot at tic.com>:
> On Sun, 2008-08-10 at 19:41 -0500, Chris Mohler wrote:
>> On Sun, Aug 10, 2008 at 6:19 PM, Christian <christian08 at runbox.com> wrote:
>> > Hi all,
>> > I am looking for a disk backup software that can backup any partition to
>> > an image and restore it at a later time.
>> > What backup software would you recommend?
>> >  Many thanks,
>> > Christian
>>
>> I've always just used dd:
>>
>> dd if=/dev/sdaX of=/path/to/file.img
>>
>> will copy from partition to image, where "X" is a partition number on
>> sda.  Then:
>>
>> dd if=/path/to/file.img of=/dev/sdaX
>
> This is not generally a good idea.  If your disk has bad sectors which
> are mapped out by the filesystem, then the dd will hang. It is better to
> do backups at the filesystem level and not at the disk level.
>
> I do near line backups with rsync to a network server and keep
> incremental copies of the filesystems using glastree which is a Perl
> implementaion of pdumpfs.  For more traditional backups, you could use
> the BSD dump/restore utilities.
> --

+1 for rsync. I also recommend the occasional cp of the data being
backed up, for a "time machine" to go back to.

-- 
Dotan Cohen

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