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From: taob@gate.sinica.edu.tw (Brian Tao)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Backing up the whole 9 yards...???
Date: 18 Aug 1995 05:42:40 GMT
Organization: Institute of Biomedical Sciences, Academia Sinica
Lines: 42
Message-ID: <41198g$mb@gate.sinica.edu.tw>
References: <DDHIzE.25r@agora.rdrop.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: 140.109.40.248
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.
Buy duplicate hard drives, put them on a second controller, then
have a nightly cron job that dd's filesystems between your originals
and mirror drives. That's pretty simple. :) Realistically, tape
drives are still the way to go for mass storage, in terms of speed,
reliability, capacity and price-per ratios. Whether you buy a 250-meg
floppy tape drive or a 40-gig DLT depends on your budget.
>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.
Depends on how often your files change and how much hassle it
would be to rebuild if, say, your hard drive had a meltdown right now.
I do nightly incrementals and weekly full backups on my machines here,
simply because losing more than a day's work would cause a lot of
trouble.
>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?
I've got AMANDA compiled and installed here, but I haven't gone
through the man pages yet to figure out exactly what it does. It
looks like it can handle everything short of labelling your tapes and
mailing them off to a safety deposit box at the local bank. ;-) It's
in the FreeBSD ports collection.
>PS: Anythings goes.... hardware, software, porno-jpegs (well, almost...)
Be sure to buy lots of tapes for that last one.... >:-)
--
Brian ("Though this be madness, yet there is method in't") Tao
taob@gate.sinica.edu.tw <-- work ........ play --> taob@io.org