Looking for backup software of complete system

Mike Noble mgnoble at cox.net
Sat Oct 9 18:33:43 UTC 2004


Rick Lim wrote:
> 
> 
> Hi there,
> 
> Could anyone recommend a backup software that would back up the whole 
> system, what I am looking for is much like Ghost for Linux but the 
> system has to keep running.
> 
> I am not worried about log files, this is the case where if the machine 
> fails then we are down for the period of time it takes to either build a 
> new OS disk and reinstall all of the custom programs and their numerous 
> quirks or grab the latest restore from the back media and just ‘clone’ a 
> new disk with all the programs setup.
> 
>  
> 
> What I have tried in the past is to clone the harddisk using the 
> harddisk upgrade howto method, but that involves taking the machine 
> completely offline, also cutting an image with Ghost means taking the 
> machine offline.
> 
>  
> 
> Thanks.
> 

Depending on the file system that you have(ext2,ext3....)
I would recommend dump or cpio. If you have a tape drive
attached (lets say /dev/st0) you can use the following
dump command:

dump 0uf /dev/st0 /

This will dump the entire contents of the / file system
to the tape drive.
You can then restore from tape with the command restore.
Restore has a flag 'i' which tells it to use interactive
mode so that you can choose individual files if needed or
'x' which says to restore everything.

restore if /dev/st0 (interactive mode)
or
restore xf

The flag 'f' stands for file/device, this means that you
can also dump to a file if needed (just replace /dev/st0
with the name of the file you wish to dump to.

dump can also be used to to incremental backups as well.
dump 2uf /dev/st0 /  will backup only those files which
have changed since the last level 0.  The number can be
anything from 0-9.  Any number higher than 0 will backup
files changed since the last lower number backup.

Mike
-- 
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