Backing up my system?

[Joe Pollock]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Meyer" <meyer_rm at yahoo.com>
To: <nflug at nflug.org>
Sent: Thursday, July 26, 2001 12:57 PM
Subject: Re: Backing up my system?


> Well, my personal favorite backup/restore for *ix is typically
'dump/restore'
> (sometimes called 'ufsdump/ufsrestore').  It is designed very specifically
for
> imaging a file system in a manner that will put it back the way it was
when
> dumped.  The restore process would be to recreate the partitions the way
that
> they were before the dump (although it's not that critical), mounting them
and
> restoring the filesystem.  Pretty simple stuff and not a lot of options.
It
> automatically excludes mountpoints of other filesystems.  I've used this
many
> times to recover dead machines that have had their hard drives replaced
after
> failures.
>
> Generally, the backup will be 'dump 0uf <backup file> /usr' for the '/usr'
> filesystem where '<backup file>' is the place to put the image.  It could
be a
> disk file or the name of a tape drive.
>
Thanks!  dump finally worked, though not quite as advertized....
I had to do each directory in my root separately e.g.

dump -0Mf /image/bin /bin

(I wrote a tiny shell script to make it easy).

I couldn't do / itself because /image would try to back itself up and that
wouldn't do.
Also, it complained that -u was invalid for use with sudirectories so I had
to leave that out.  I think that means that nothing was written to the
backup history file and that I can't do anything except 0 level backups to
/image.

One puzzlement: My whole hard disk is "only" 30GB, but /usr was broken up
into 37 backup volumes!  The docs say something about wanting to keep
individual volumes under 2GB, but given the size of my hard disk, more than
17GB of which is in Windoz and /image, the fact that my dos partitions were
unmounted, and the fact that linux has lots of free disk space there must be
some other factor limiting the size of the backup volumes.  Any ideas?

Joe Pollock