Re: [opensuse] Backup solutions

Quoting Aaron Kulkis :

Jeffrey L. Taylor wrote:

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Quoting Philippe Landau :

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What can a simple user use to backup his installation ?

External USB,eSATA,Firewire hard disk. Use System Rescue CD and dd to copy entire partitions to hard disk. This is for bare metal restore. Use

Why would you want a byte-by-byte copy of the raw disk or any of it's partitions? That ends up including unused/deallocated blocks. Any rational backup system requires is only that which resides in files, and the overall directory structure, not blocks which are currently NOT allocated to any file or directory.

Because dd is file-system independent. You don't yet trust the NTFS support in Linux, no problem. Your bare metal restore boot CD doesn't support the exotic file system you use for your database partition. Not a problem. Weird undocumented partition/filesystem used by the OEM (e.g. recovery partition on IBM/Lenovo Thinkpads or some Compacs). Same thing. Looking at the dump Web site, it appears that dump is still for extfs2 only. That was the reason why I stopped using it years ago. Though it was nice until I switched file systems. Note: the raw partition copies are for bare metal restores (i.e., the whole disk went up is smoke and you are replacing it with a blank hard drive). There are better programs for daily backup and restore. Because dump bypasses the OS file system code, it MUST support the filesystem you use. Most other utilities go thru the OS and will support most file systems the OS does. However, Access Control Lists (ACLs) and other high security file system features are another matter. Jeffrey -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org