backup

[jafni]

how to backup my data fail by automatically for example after 12 a.m???

[tashirosgt]

What media do you want to back it onto? A tape, cd , another hd? Are you on a network and want to back it up to another machine?

[jafni]

onto hd...

I want backup it up to anather mechine with solaris 9 OS on network

[fryem720]

I don't want to steal another person's thread, but backing up in Linux has always been a mystery to me. I have a stand-alone computer that only I use. I have a cd-writer and a 30 GB external usb 2.0 harddrive.

1. WHAT should I back up?

I want to back up my data, but also things like (a) firefox bookmarks, settings, extensions, etc.; and (b) thunderbird settings, mail, contacts, extensions, etc., because I like to play around and sometimes I hose my system and have to do a clean install (fc2). But I don't want to lose my stuff or have to reconfigure accounts and re-install extensions.

2. HOW do I back up?

BTW, I would much prefer a program with a well-thought out gui for choosing options, destinations, etc.

3. HOW do I restore what I've backed up?

And finally, can anyone recommend a disk imaging program with a good gui that I can use to make an image of my system that I can easily restore when I (as I inevitably will) hose my system again?

Thanks!

[tashirosgt]

jafni,
Roughly speaking, you use the crontab command to create an special file that is read by the cron daemon. That crontab can execute a script you write. If the networked drives are mounted on your local filesystem then you could just write a script to copy the data to them. I'm not an expert on this (and there might be fancy gui programs that automate this process). Start another thread on the topic "How do I backup my data over a network" so the network experts can help you.

fryem720
I'd like to know the optimal answer to 3. myself. The only place to put an image of a reasonablly large installation would be on another hard drive. If you have space enough on the first hard drive, you can tar up the stuff on the first drive
and copy the tar file to the second. This is not a perfect solution when it comes time to restore things - or perhaps I don't know the right options to use on the tar command, because sometimes things involving links don't get set right. But people I know at work do this alll the time, not as a backup, but to clone an installation on one computer to another machine. This works reasonably well when the new machine's hardware is exactly the same as the original machine (and that would be the case in restoring things to the original hard drive.) When this is done, you have be careful to partition the new hard drive so its partitions can hold the amounts of un-tarred data that arrives.

[tashirosgt]

...and to comprehend crontab files:
man 5 crontab
gives the information on the file needed by:
man 1 crontab

[kilrex]

Maybe you will also want to have a look at this [1] and this [2] for some information about crontabbing.

kilrex

[1] http://weather.ou.edu/~billston/crontab/
[2] http://www.tech-geeks.org/contrib/md...ntab-howto.htm

[crackers]

There a quite a few ways to backup your data (unfortunately, you have to determine what the data is). Amanda is a complete cross-platform networked backup system, comes with the FC2 disks (don't know about Solaris support). rsync is a nice way of making sure you have an accurate mirror of a filesystem, the "old-school" way of using tar and bzip2 or gzip (all of these programs have man pages - type "man progname" in a terminal or browse the man-pages in the help browser - Gnome and KDE).

Being the Java geek that I am, I actually use an Ant build-file to do the backups with tar/bzip2 to a temp directory, mount a Zip disk, and move the archive to the disk and then unmount it (off-line backup). I use cron to run this every night at 3 AM.

[nyba]

this place gives a list of directions, links, and basic ideas about backup,

for configuration file backup, I heard of confstore, a set of perl programs to do the backup configuation files

another one sounds very good is called rdiff-backup, you can get it online, seems a lot of people using it

@fryem720
to just backups your user data and setting, just copy you /home directory to a cd.
here is a tutorial to backups using rsync

[imdeemvp]

i tried explore2f last night and i was able to move my linux data to windows....nice! thanks to reks (the kid on prozac )

http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/explore2fs.htm

[nyba]

http://www.linux-backup.net

too forgetful, here it is!

[imdeemvp]

nyba,

very good info....thanks a lot.

[mugga]

This might help someone...
Just edit it so suit your system, chuck it in your "/etc/cron.daily/" directory and away it goes...
http://www.mwynwood.com/bw/index.php?module=portfolio

#!/bin/bash
# This is supposed to back up important
# files to another hard drive
#
# By: Marcus Wynwood (www.mwynwood.com)
# Created: 3 Sep 2004
# Edited: 23 Sep 2004
                                                                                                                             
# Settings
backupPath="/mnt/60gb/Linux/backup" # Where the backups will go
importantFiles="/etc/cron.hourly/importantFiles" # Files to be backed up
backupAge="7" # How many days to keep old backups
                                                                                                                             
# Show dumb banner :-)
clear
figlet System Backup # http://www.figlet.org/
echo -e ""
                                                                                                                             
# Delete files that are older than XX days
echo "Deleting backups that are older than $backupAge days..."
cd $backupPath
find . -mtime +$backupAge -exec rm {} \;
                                                                                                                             
# Make an archive with the files
echo "Creating new backup..."
tar -zPcf $backupPath/backup-`date +%F`-`date +%H%M`.tar.gz -T $importantFiles
 
# List results
echo "----------------------------------------------------------------------"
ls -lhr --color=always $backupPath
echo "----------------------------------------------------------------------"
 
# Beep!
echo -e "Backup Complete!\a\n"

[jafni]

thanx...
what about if i want to tranfer my backup file on local mechine to another mechine onto it's hard disk.