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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.rmit.EDU.AU!news.unimelb.EDU.AU!munnari.OZ.AU!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!swrinde!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news.sprintlink.net!gol2!usenet From: Doug Lerner <doug@gol.com> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Backup Suggestions? Date: 29 Dec 1995 01:47:07 GMT Organization: Global OnLine Japan (+81-3-5330-9385) Lines: 49 Message-ID: <4bvhar$og3@gol2.gol.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 202.243.53.5 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-2022-jp Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 1.1N (Macintosh; I; 68K) X-URL: news:comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc I always ask embarrassingly novice questions here, but I am always grateful by the serious and genuinely helpful responses I get. This time it is about backup. I have been running my FreeBSD 2.05 system uneventfully since the summer. It has been reliably handling NNTP and SMTP for my BBS members 24 hours a day without a single problem. Even now there are no problems. Except....and I am embarrassed to admit this....I have yet to do a backup of the hard disk. This is more than a little bit beginning to gnaw at my conscience, because if the machine were to fail all the configurations I have labored to do since putting the machine in, not to mention the members data and special scripts, will all be lost. The problem is, unlike my Mac (which I can just stick an MO-disk drive on and backup) I don't really have an idea of how to backup the system. The hard disk is a 1 Gigabyte Quantum Fireball SCSI drive, but the SCSI connector is on the motherboard (a DX-4 system with 16MB RAM) and there are no outside connections to daisy-chain another SCSI device to. There is still an extra slot, so one idea was to add another Fireball into that slot and do a daily dump onto the second hard drive (one gigabyte hard drives are so cheap now). Is that the easiest solution? Is there some way of mounting my MO-drive via one of the Macs or Windows 95 machines on my tiny LAN and dumping that way? I hate to open up the tower case and start fiddling with adding in a new hard drive and formatting it and so on without first backing up! (Catch- 22 isn't it?) Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Somebody wrote in a recent message that 99% of the important local configuration files were in /etc, so I think I will at least try to backup /etc to floppies today. Thanks, Doug Lerner, Tokyo