[PLUG] Backups?

Elliott Mitchell ehem at m5p.com
Tue Jun 21 05:39:44 UTC 2005


>From: "John Jordan" <johnxj at comcast.net>
> Did I miss where the free simple backup utility is located?

There are three utilities generally used for this purpose. `rsync`, this
is used for simply duplicating the filesystem tree, often over a network,
but can also be used locally. `tar`, "tape archive", reasonably effective
as a backup tool. `dump/restore`, a pair of tools specifically designed
for backups, dump is filesystem specific and brutal in its approach, but
wonderful for its intended purpose, mainly backups.

Often the output archive from dump or tar is run through `gzip` or
`bzip2`. Both are compression programs, plain and simple. gzip is the
older, while bzip2 compresses better but is slower. Notably none of the
above tools do compression, that is a seperate step from archiving.

Putting it together, for dump:

dump -u#f - <FS> | gzip > archive-<FS>.#.gz

Where # would be the level of the dump (0 is full, 1-9 are layers of
incrementals). <FS> is the filesystem, each has to be done seperately,
so "/", "/usr", "/var", and "/home" each needs to be done depending on
your installation.

For restoring:

gunzip -c archive-<FS>.#.gz | restore -rf -

Starting with the level 0, and going through each incremental in turn.
After you've done all the levels, you delete the file "restoresymtab".


And now it is time for the holy war on tar versus dump to get going
again.  :-/


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