[PLUG] Backups?

[Eric Wilhelm]

# The following was supposedly scribed by
# John Jordan
# on Monday 20 June 2005 10:05 pm:

>Did I miss where the free simple backup utility is located?

Just fire-up a shell and do this:

  tar -czvf mybackup.tar.gz /etc/

That's about as simple as it gets.  If you want it graphically, there's 
ark.

Now you have a backup, I suppose you would like to schedule it :-)  A 
lot of people do this with cron, but that oftens ends-up a bit ugly.

I've been working on (ok, haven't been working on) what I call the "bag 
of hammers backup" program.  I call it that because it's dumber than a 
bag of hammers to backup a linux system onto a windows share (not that 
it's dumb of you to do it, rather that it's the smartest thing you can 
do if you have to talk to something as stupid as a windows box.)  When 
you're talking to something smarter, you can use programs like dirvish, 
rbackup, etc.

In any case, the idea was that you could set it up even if you were 
dumber than a bag of hammers.  I'm still working on that user-friendly 
bit though.  It's essentially just a fancy scheduler/configurator for 
the above tar command (but does rolling backups, etc.)

The code is in my svn/, though it hasn't been finished to the point that 
I thought it deserved packaging.  In particular, there's some stuff 
that happens in the guts of Getopt::Helpful that I've been trying to 
work-out which bohbackup needs to work right.

I haven't found much else that really does the job in the situation 
where a linux box is among a windows network and not a server.  Kind of 
rare I guess except when you're a newbie or you're just getting a shop 
started on Linux.

--Eric
-- 
"Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth."
--Albert Einstein
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