I'm fairly new in the realm of Linux, and I've got most of the basics
down. What I want to prepare for is complete system recovery.
I need:
a) a good program to backup the system completely (I have removable
drives, and network connections available)
b) how to go about completely recovering system from this backup if
the hard drive completely dies.
There are many tools supplied with Linux to do this, and many third
On Fri, 13 Aug 2004 08:19:56 -0500
"Steve Kratz" wrote:
party tools. One tool that is common to all Linux and Unix systems is
tar. You can run tar (as root) from the root (or mount point) of each
file system, and backup the system to a tar archive, and compress it
with gzip or bzip. The cp command will allow you to copy any directory
recursively. Rsync will allow you to copy a directory tree, copying only
what has been changed or added. Since Linux generally does not have any
unmovable files, these tools work fine.
Other backup systems, such as amanda are also available.
Let's say that you copied your root file system to another removable
drive using cp (with -pR) or rsync, and your primary drive fails. All
you would need to do is to pop in the copy with one caveat, and that is
the boot loader. The boot loader installs in the MBR and points to the
stage2. With LILO, the second stage is the kernel, with GRUB it is the
stage2 boot. However, you should be able to boot from floppy or CD. Or,
better still, you can always write the MBR by using the rescue disk.
--
Jerry Feldman
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9