On Sat, Oct 24, 2009 at 10:14, Hassan Ammar <heccen@yahoo.
> Can anyone tell me how to back the my linux (Red Had Enterprise version) system state so that if in future it is crashed i can restore.
> Now a days i'm backing up the files in use like dhcpd.conf, squid.conf, fstab and so on. Is there any systematic or professional approach that i may follow like i use ntbackup in windows environment.
Hi Hassan,
First, I'm going to tell you what I usually start off telling
everyone... google is your friend. I say that because you'll need it
in a minute :-)
backups are different for different people and systems. The way you
back up a system is entirely up to you. I have a couple systems that
get weekly full and nightly incremental backups. I also have a couple
that only get /home backed up... and one that only gets /home and /etc
backed up.
So the question is, what do you ACTUALLY want to back up? Even my
"full weekly" backups on production systems ONLY save data, home
directories and config directories, logs and so forth. In the case of
a failure, I'd still have to re=install a fresh OS then restore the
data, configs and logs and such from backup. The plan there is to
keep a kickstart script for each machine, and do the backups. Then,
if/when it dies, I can reinstall the exact system via kickstart, and
restore files from the backups.
The others should be a little easier to figure out on your own.
SO now, what do you USE to backup? You can use cp, scp, ftp, or what
have you. That's the easiest way. My file server at home gets backed
up to an external hard disk simply rsync. That's another tool that
gets used a LOT... so google some info on rsync.
For a more "full featured" method, pretty much all distros still
provide Amanda. Amanda is actually a tape backup system, designed to
be used with single slot tape drives or multi-slot vaults and robots.
HOWEVER, it can also be used to back your system up either to a local
hard disk, or to storage on another server, or a NAS or what have you.
So google Amanda Tape Backup for more info on that.
There are also some "professional" linux based backup solutions as
well. The only one of those I've ever used to any degree of success
was from Veritas and it was rather pricey, even for a small ISP. You
can google Linux Backup Solutions and some similar things to that to
get some commercial backup solutions.
Finally, there's the old standby, tar. see the man page for tar, and
google "tar backup linux" and you should get some idea of what tar can
do. Tar is probably the MOST commonly used backup system for Linux
because it can be used to backup to tape, disk, remote sites,
whatever. It can compress on the fly (using gzip of bzip2) and it can
do things like incremental and such if you know what youre doing...
You should be able to find quite a few bits on information on using
tar as a backup strategy/tool.
SO that should get you started. Your question really is a bit broad,
and thus is hard to answer specifically. BUT unless you're doing some
major backup work on a datacenter or something, writing a shell script
to use either rsync or tar will do you just fine...
Also, I'll mention one final idea... dd. dd does a bit by bit copy of
a disk or filesystem and creates an image from that. I only mention
that because using dd is a down and dirty way of doing what Ghost
does. And I don't really consider disk imaging as a "real" backup
solution. Disk imaging is really better suited to system provisioning
due to the fact that you aren't really backing up your data so much as
duplicating a drive. It CAN be useful, but I think it uses far more
disk space than you really need to be using. Also, imaging a disk,
unlike the methods I mentioned above, does not allow you to do file or
directory level restores. You either restore the ENTIRE filesystem,
or you do not. Yes, that can be worked around, but honestly, just
stick with Amanda, rsync or tar for your backup tool and you'll be
fine.
Cheers
Jeff
--
Pablo Picasso - "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
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