Need Recommendation for Hard Disk Backup for Redhat 8

[Guest Jose]

Being a noobie I am not sure about what software to use to do a full backup on the drive that my Red Hat 8.0 system is on. I have a second hard drive which is the same size as the drive on which my system is on and I wish to regularly back up my system to the extra drive. What do you recommend?

[aru]

Why don't you implement one of those RAID solutions?

 

You can use this recent article from Linux Journal as some sort of introduction: High Availability Linux with Software RAID

[johnnyv]

Why don't you implement one of those RAID solutions?  

 

You can use this recent article from Linux Journal as some sort of introduction: High Availability Linux with Software RAID

 

raid doesn't save you from misconfiguration, only hd failure. Still it is nice too have.

[Cannonfodder]

What kind of backup? An exact copy or an incremental backup?

[Guest Jose]

Actually I was thinking more about software backup. I think I have settled on 'mirrordir'. I will try it this weekend.

[pmpatrick]

You might want to try partimage. Download the bootable CD iso here:

 

http://www.partimage.org/download.php3

[Guest Jose]

I will download partimage and try that too. Maybe I should use both for extra measure.

[johnnyv]

All i ever do is backup my data by tar.bz2 then onto cdr's.

I never backup the software except for rpms that i have downloaded or rebuilt and some of the important configuration files.

 

Doesn't take me long to install mdk if a hdd fails so i don't bother with a full backup.

Besides if i had another 80gb i would use it.

[Guest Jose]

I am so new that I don't know yet which files to backup if I were to backup just the important files. I guess I'd back up my configuration files. Such as Apache, vsftp, dns, sendmail etc.

And I'd write down how I had partition my drive. Is there anything which I am missing?

[Cannonfodder]

partimage is good for backingup an image/ghost of a partition. Not really for an incremental or partial backup.. Gotta figure out what you want to backup..

 

You can do a full image backup with partimage, burn them to CD's (if its worth it). This creates a single compressed file per partition.

 

Then backup your

 

/etc

/home

/root

 

in an incremental backup using drakbackup, mondo or mindi..

 

http://www.microwerks.net/~hugo/

[Guest Kamikaze_Gerbil]

Actually I was thinking more about software backup.  I think I have settled on 'mirrordir'.  I will try it this weekend.

 

Thats what I use. Works great. Try this site for good info:

 

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6564

:D

[Guest Jose]

Kamikaze_Gerbil,

I just have two questions about mirrordir, when setting up the other

hard drive:

What do I format it too?

Do I have to create the same partition sizes as the original?

I have two 40gb drives, one has the linux and the other currently has one big fat and empty vfat partition.