Re: [tlug] backups

[Stoyan Zhekov <sto@example.com>]

> What are most people using to do backups? It seems dump/restore seems to
> be the standard for backups. Has anyone tried/is using xfsdump?

The question is too common. What kind of backups? Do you want to backup one machine
or several ones? Do you want full backups, incremental backups? If there are several
machines are they with the same OSes or with different?

Some things just to start with:

- For network backups - several machines with different OSes -- maybe Amanda will do the job:
http://www.amanda.org/
samba also can do the backups for the shared windows disks.

- If you want to backup several *nix machines to one central server check rsync:
http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/examples.html

- For one machine native backup utilities (tar,cpio etc.), wrapped with some script (perl or shell)
  are pretty enough. Some examples:
http://www.bluehaze.com.au/unix/cdbkup.html -- cool perl script for backups on CD.
uses find, sed, cpio and fsplit. support full backups, deltas
 
My personal opinion is that saving only textual config files (/etc dir) and md5 sums for other files is enough.
If something is broken, hacked, cracked etc. (the md5sum is different) just reinstall it.

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