What backup software?

[Karl Larsen]

Smoot Carl-Mitchell wrote:
> 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.
>   
    I use rsync for a manual backup every so often on my Hardy. The 
system is an external 30 GB HD in a plastic case connected to my 
computer via a USB port. I format the HD with ext3 and it mounts on my 
computer at /media/disk/. As a root user I start rsync from a file. Here 
is my file:

# This goes to the USB hard drive
rsync -vaH --exclude '/proc' --exclude 'sys'  --exclude '/mnt' --exclude 
'/media' /. /media/disk

A problem with rsync is every ' is critical. Notice --exclude 'sys' 
tells rsync to not backup the /sys directory.

    It works fast and I have recovered from the portable HD. It is perfect.

Karl


-- 

	Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
	Linux User
	#450462   http://counter.li.org.
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