Backups allowing individual file restoration

[Jeff Vian]

On Mon, 2005-03-14 at 11:36 +0000, Paul Howarth wrote:
> Gerry Doris wrote:
> > I'm looking for an application that will create an image of a full 
> > Fedora drive that can be used for either a bare metal restore or can be 
> > used to restore individual directories or files.  I use Partition Image 
> > for this for my Window boxes.
> > 
> > I've tried using Partimage.  It's a great program but it only creates 
> > images of complete partitions and can only restore the complete 
> > partition...no directory or file access.  It looks like G4U and G4L 
> > actually use Partimage so I assume they work the same.
> > 
> > I don't want to use either CD's or DVD's.  I would like to 
> > backup/restore either to another hard drive on the system being backed 
> > up or across my network to a server.
> > 
> > Any reommendations would be appreciated.
> 
> bacula can backup to disks on the same or other servers. Moreover, it 
> keeps a database of the backed-up files, allowing retrieval of 
> individual files by date if required. Bare metal restores are also possible.
> 
> Highly recommended.
> 
> http://www.bacula.org/
> 
> Paul.
> 
I tried bacula and went back to mondorescue.  

It seemed bacula does no compression so it relies on the native
compression on the tape drives to save space.  It wasted a lot of drive
space to do a backup to drive.

MondoRescue OTOH does compression to the level (0 - 9) you specify so
the savings in drive space for the backups on my system was more than
50%.