Per Jessen wrote:

John, I think perhaps you need to consider what you want to backup, when you want to back it up and to where you want to back it up to. Then come back and tell us "I want to back up /etc /home and /root", "I want to do it every day at 0400 in the morning" and "I want to do it to DVDs". I'm sure you'll get some more comprehensive answers with those details.

To prod your imagination, here's what I do: I do backups to disk. I select fairly carefully what I want to backup. I have a backup server, currently with a 500GB RAID1 array and a smaller 300GB ditto. (for historical reasons). They are both under LVM. During the night (0000-0700CET) I do daily differential backups of every machine. On Sundays I do full backups. I can't remember what the method is usually called, but it involves rsync and the --link-dest option. /Per -- Per Jessen, Zürich (25.2°C) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Thursday 18 June 2009 11:54:06 am John Heinen wrote:

Last year after our computer crashed I had no way of retrieving the backup for windows, with the help of a great guy Gary, luckely we were able to retrieve a lot of files. Now I am getting restless because I still don't really know how to back up windows and open suse and files, either directly or auto. Next question is, can I backup all stuff on dvd's. John

John, Two primary choices: (1) if you have another 1 or 2 machines on your network (or across the internet depending on connection speed) that have spare drive space (almost everything does now), you can use rsync to back the files up to another machine. If you are running openSuSE on the box that is dual-boot with windows, you can back up both the windows files and the linux files while that box is running openSuSE (you will use ssh-keygen to provide passwordless login between the linux boxes to automate the backup). Just put the set of rsync commands in a script and call it from cron at 4:30 am and your backup will happen automatically every day; ** Note, if you are backing up machine-to-machine as in (1), I still recommend a CD/DVD/tape backup every few days to a week just in case corruption occurs with your master set of files that gets propagated to the backup machines. (2) if you have a CD/DVD drive in your machine, put a blank disk in the drive and look at the command wodim (the new cdrecord) that you can call wodem (or growisofs if using a DVD for backup) from a simple script called from cron at 4:30 (or pick your favorite time) and again, you get a backup each day; Of course for both methods you can use "tar -cjf backupset-date.tar.bz2 /path/to/files/to/backup" to reduce the size of the backup copy. You may also want to include a copy of "fdisk -l > partition.info" and of any configuration files like "/etc/apache2/httpd.conf.local, etc..." in your set for quicker recovery if your primary box craters. There are many other programs or scripts that try and automate the process for you, but I have found that if you just commit the hour or so it takes to learn 'rsync', 'wodim', 'growisofs' and 'tar -cjf newtarfile.tar.bz2 /files/to/include' or 'tar -czf newtarfile.tar.gz /files/to/include', you can solve any backup task with far more ease and efficiency that you can ever hope to do configuring some coded "backup program." You can find all you need to know on every part of the backup process by just searching the opensuse list and looking at the man page. -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. Rankin Law Firm, PLLC 510 Ochiltree Street Nacogdoches, Texas 75961 Telephone: (936) 715-9333 Facsimile: (936) 715-9339 www.rankinlawfirm.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org