On Saturday 18 January 2003 17:02, Alexandr Malusek wrote:
fsanta
writes: Sorry it's not very coherent. I run a school network under NIS. Say for whatever reason I have to reinstall the system from scratch. The only data I care about is in /home. I want to be able to copy back the /home directory and all user settings so that normal work can be resumed. Users directories under /home are automounted via NIS. The only computer to have a 'real' copy is the server. The backup must copy *everything* in the /home directory. The backup should be stored on a client in the network.
OK. Then you have to decide the backup strategy:
1. The type of backup: - full backup only - incremental backup - differential backup - a mixture of the above
2. The frequency of the backup.
The decision depends on many factors, mainly: (1) the ratio between the amount of data you want to back up and the capacity of the storage space, (2) administrators' expertise, (3) the amount of money.
You can buy an expensive software where you simply select the backup strategy in a GUI environment or you can write a shell script which will do it without paying anything.
I don't recommend a complicated backup strategy (for instance a mixture of differential and incremental backups) if the administrators' knowledge is not good enough. A recipe how to restore the data should be in a folder but they may not understand it anyway.
The backup is not related to NIS or NFS.
I think I'll go for incremental daily backup via rsync, dump that to dvd once a month, clear out the backup directory and start again the next month with a new rsync'd copy. How does that sound. Or am I way off? Thanks for your patience, Steve.