*BSD News Article 49679


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From: peter@nmti.com (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Re: Backing up the whole 9 yards...???
Message-ID: <id.SCRM1.LNA@nmti.com>
Sender: peter@nmti.com (peter da silva)
Organization: Network/development platform support, NMTI
References: <DDHIzE.25r@agora.rdrop.com>
Date: Thu, 24 Aug 1995 02:15:26 GMT
Lines: 40

In article <DDHIzE.25r@agora.rdrop.com>,
Craig Keenan <sundans@agora.rdrop.com> wrote:
> 1)  What is the simplest AND most complete way of backing up an ENTIRE 
> filesystem, so that in the case of something disastrous, Joe User would 
> at least have a nice mirror of his system xx days ago.  Also, what is the 
> best way to perform a recovery from ground 0 (maybe a good 
> backup-recovery floppy would be good here??  There's an idea...).

Use "dump" and "restore". A recovery floppy that just includes a kernel and
enough stuff to mount and restore should be easy enough to make.

DAT is good enough and cheap enough for most people's home systems. I wouldn't
mess with the Colorado type systems. The ones that are big enough to be worth
messing with cost as much as a cheap DAT.

> 2)  What seems to be the best philosophies for different types of systems 
> (ie.  Joe's home-piss-around-with-Doom system, slightly critical systems 
> like maybe an ISP user database, and super-critical like Barney Clark's 
> Artifical Heart GUI Interface [running FreeBSD -stable, of course]).  
> I've heard of full backups every week, with 4-hourly incrementals; every 
> month full backups only; and lotsa other schemes.

Daily backups are ideal. I backup to 60M cartridges at home, so what I get
are monthly backups. It takes all day to run fulls, so I usually only full
one partition each time.

I want a DAT for Xmas.

> 3)  Is there any good free package out there that can automate a large 
> percentage of this, or does it usually boil down to each and every user 
> tailoring his own backup script?

AMANDA, from the University of Maryland, by James da Silva (no relation).

No contest.
-- 
Peter da Silva    (NIC: PJD2)      `-_-'             1601 Industrial Boulevard
Bailey Network Management           'U`             Sugar Land, TX  77487-5013
+1 713 274 5180         "Har du kramat din varg idag?"                     USA
Bailey pays for my technical expertise.        My opinions probably scare them