You asked for it. I tried to warn you but nooooo, you just haaaaaad to ask. P.S. DJ Tiesto is not worth $22. Commercial ones: BRU (Backup and Restore Utility), has been in the Linux world since as long as Linux Journal (they have had ads in there since the beginning as far as I can tell). This program affords a relatively complete set of tools in a nice unified format, with command line and a graphical front end (easy to automate in other words). It supports full, incremental and differential backups, as well as catalogs, and can write to a file or tape drive, basically a solid, simple, easy to use backup program. BRU is available at http://www.estinc.com/features.html. Quickstart Quickstart is more aimed at making an image of the system so that when the hard drive fails/etc. you can quickly re-image a blank disk and have a working system. It can also be used to 'master' a system and then load other systems quickly (as an alternative to say Red Hat's kickstart). It's reasonably priced as well and garnered a good revue in Linux Journal (Nov 1998, page 50). You can get it at: http://www.estinc.com/qsdr.html. Backup Professional http://www.unitrends.com/bp.html CTAR http://www.unitrends.com/ctar.html CTAR:NET http://www.unitrends.com/ctarnet.html PC ParaChute http://www.unitrends.com/pcpara.html Arkeia Arkeia is a very powerful backup program with a client - server architecture that supports many platforms. This is an 'industrial' strength product and appropriate for heterogeneous environments, it was reviewed in Linux Journal (April 1999, page 38) and you can download a shareware version online and give it a try, the URL is: http://www.arkeia.com/. Legato Networker Legato Networker is another enterprise class backup program, with freely available (but unsupported) Linux clients. Legato Networker is available at: http://www.legato.com/Products/html/legato_networker.html and the Linux clients are available from: ftp://ftp.legato.com/pub/Unsupported/Linux_Client/. Perfect Backup Perfect Backup supports almost all Linux distributions and has crash recovery. You can get it from: http://www.merlinsoftech.com/nonflash/merlinhome.htm. Non Commercial ones: Tar and Gzip Oldies but still goldies, tar and gzip. Why? Because like vi you can darn near bet the farm on the fact that any UNIX system will have tar and gzip. They may be slow, klunky and starting to show their age, but it's a universal tool that will get the job done. I find with Linux the installation of a typical system takes 15-30 minutes depending on the speed of the network/cdrom, configuration another 5-15 (assuming I have backups or it is very simple) and data restoration takes as long as it takes (definitely not something you should rush). Good example: I recently backed up a server and then proceeded to blow the filesystem away (and remove 2 physical HD's that I no longer needed), I then installed Red Hat 5.2, and reconfigured all 3 network cards, Apache (for about 10 virtual sites), Bind and several other services in about 15 minutes. If I had done it from scratch it would have taken me several hours. Simply: tar -cvf archive-name.tar dir1 dir2 dir3.... to create the tarball of all your favorite files (typically /etc, /var/spool/mail/, /var/log/, /home, and any other user/system data), followed by a: gzip -9 archive-name.tar to compress it as much as possible (granted harddrive space is cheaper then a politicians promise but compressing it makes it easier to move around). You might want to use bzip, which is quite a bit better then gzip at compressing text, but it is quite a bit slower. I typically then make a copy of the archive on a remote server, either by ftping it or emailing it as an attachment if it's not to big (e.g. the backup of a typical firewall is around 100k or so of config files). rsync rsync is an ideal way to move data between servers. It is very efficient for maintaining large directory trees in synch (not real time mind you), and is relatively easy to configure and secure. rsync does not encrypt the data however so you should use something like IPSec if the data is sensitive. rsync is kben10000116.html Amanda Amanda is a client/server based network backup programs with support for most unices and Windows (via SAMBA). Amanda is BSD style licensed and available from: http://www.amanda.org/. afbackup Afbackup is another client/server with a generally GPL license with one minor exception, development of the server portion on Windows is forbidden. Afbackup has server support for Linux, HP-UX and Solaris, and has clients for that and windows. You can download it at: ftp://ftp.zn-gmbh.com/pub/linux/. Burt Burt is a Tcl/Tk based set of extensions that allow for easy backups of Unix workstations, this allows it to run on pretty much any system. Burt is a client/server architecture and appears pretty scalable, it is available at: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~jmelski/burt/.

* Peter Münster (Fri, Feb 23, 2001 at 12:38:49PM +0100)

On Fri, 23 Feb 2001, RoMaN SoFt / LLFB!! wrote:

...

Linux using it. I'd like to know if SuSE ships any kind of backup software and which is your prefered one. I'd also like to hear about

I'm using dump (http://dump.sourceforge.net/). It is a standard Linux tool, on the SuSE CDs, makes incremental backups, supports multiple volumes and is easy to use. In the future, there will be also support for compression.

But dump doesn';t handle reiserfs volumes ... Currently listening to: 2-Dupree\'s Paradise Gerhard, <@jasongeo.com> == The Acoustic Motorbiker == -- __O Got no religion, don't need no friends =`\<, Got all I want and I got no need to pretend (=)/(=) Don't try to reach me, 'cause I'd tear up your mind I've seen the future and I leave it all behind