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Using the "System Backup" option under YaST2, several problems became apparent. The archive created was 7 GB in size. It could not be viewed as Konqueror complained that the archive could not be found. Running system restore under YaST2 was also a slow and painful process. For the moment, and this could be down to inexperience, this does not seem to be a useful strategy. As an alternative, "rsync" is being tested as a number of users on this list have mentioned and recommended it. A Iomega firewire drive with a capacity of 20GB will be used as the backup device. The format of the command used to backup the home directory is "rsync -av / home /media/firewire_ext2/home". Similar commands are used to backup data stored on an external usb2 drive, /etc directory, /boot directory, /opt directory. The compression option is not being used as the experience so far has not been good. The PC specification and use is: - AMD 2.6GZ Athlon XP with 512 MB ram and 60 GB drive - Dual boot SuSE 9 and Dark Side XP (which is very rarely used) - Two external hard drivers, a 60GB usb2 and 20GB firewire - The PC is used as a small server connected with three other computers, with Apache used as a proxy server to share a broadband connection - Two network adapters are used, one is a 10/100 Realtek Card connected to a wired lan while the other is a Netgear MA101 usb wireless adapter connected to a wireless ADSL modem Any advice in this respect will be appreciated. The particular areas comments would be welcome on are : - Is this a good strategy? - What directories should be backed up? - Is there any way to replicate what YaST2 system restore does to backup installed packages and other data? - A better alternative? If there are others, please feel free to comment. TIA. LW999
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The Sunday 2003-11-02 at 13:22 -0000, LinuxWorld999 wrote:
Using the "System Backup" option under YaST2, several problems became apparent. The archive created was 7 GB in size. It could not be viewed as Konqueror complained that the archive could not be found. Running system restore under YaST2 was also a slow and painful process. For the moment, and this could be down to inexperience, this does not seem to be a useful strategy.
I know. And it has got to make a copy of everything that it is going to backup somewhere in /tmp, so it is easy enough to crash it if you don't have enough free space for this. It is only usefull if you only want to save the "system", not your data. Ie, you have to specify don't save "/home" and such. Right now I'm unsure, but I don't thinks it saves settings from one run tho the next. It also doesn't have a browse thing to select what not to save or save. It is lacking. One posibility about the size problem is to use the yast backup to simply create a list of files to save (it has that option), and then use a script to make the copy - I haven't tested this. Perhaps this way it doesn't create the autoinstall files.
The compression option is not being used as the experience so far has not been good.
Do you know you can create compressed CDs? They can be read on the fly, transparently, by the linux kernel, but the creation is a bit cumbersome. I do them sometimes as backup, with my own script (not good enough, I'm afraid). -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson
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On Sunday 02 November 2003 13:22, LinuxWorld999 wrote:
As an alternative, "rsync" is being tested as a number of users on this list have mentioned and recommended it
during the working day, < rsync > is handy to use, every few minutes, to back up /home directory to a spare Hard Disk [ kept unmounted while not being used by rsync ]. -- best wishes ____________ sent on Linux ____________
participants (3)
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Carlos E. R.
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LinuxWorld999
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pinto