Linux Backup

[Harold Hallikainen]

As a follow-up to my notes of before, I was successful at using G4L (Ghost
For Linux) to create an image file of the drive in my server on a USB hard
drive, then restoring that image to another drive of the same size, then
plugging that drive into the server and having it work! The USB drive was
originally formatted with FAT32 or similar, so it would not handle the
large file size of the image. G4L can break the image into multiple files,
but I was unable to get that to work. So I reformatted the drive as an
ext3 (I think) and just created one large image file. G4L also comes with
a script that writes a giant file full of 0x00, using all available drive
space, then deletes the file. When compression (I used gz) is enabled on
the image creation, the sectors holding 0x00 take very little space in the
image. So the backup drive doesn't need to be as large (or larger) than
the drive being backed up if the drive being backed up is not full. For
off site storage, Amazon's Simple Storage Service
(http://aws.amaxon.com/s3) looks interesting, though it appears "objects"
are limited to 5GB in size.

Anyway, THANKS to listmembers, I now feel a bit more comfortable about my
backups!

Thanks!

Harold


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