This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
Subject: Re: Linux -vs- MS crash recovery
From: Ramon Gandia <rfg@nook.net>
Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 01:22:01 +0000
Thomas E. Keiser wrote:
> Crash Recovery is something that greatly interests me. (my
> definition of crash recovery is the ability to quickly
> restore the OS from tape or other storage, without first
> having to reinstall it). One of the best solutions I have
> ever found is "Drive Image" software from PowerQuest. It
> works with Win 9.x and NT, and of course DOS / Win 3. One
> way to do it is to put your OS onto its own partition,
> then make an "image" (compressed track-by-track file) of
> that partition onto another place, such as an additional
> partition, a network drive, or removable media. If you
> need to recover, the software will delete the OS
> partition, and restore it from the previous image. It only
> takes a few minutes, and you are back in business with all
> settings, etc ready to go. Recovery can be done with
> minimal coaching over the phone by most any client
> employee.
BRU has something similar. Not the regular BRU2000 software,
but a different program to restore an entire disk image, OS and
all. I have not bought it, but it would seem to work.
> Unfortunately, PowerQuest has not yet gotten the message,
> and does not support Linux. Their product will image ext2
> filesystem partitions, but they will not offer any advice
> nor will they state that their product "works" with Linux.
The software industry is full of unenlightened people. In truth,
when it comes to backup, Win95/98/NT is in DIRE needs of backup.
Us Linux guys have it easy.
> To the best of my knowledge, none of the Linux backup
> products can do crash recovery without a lot of extra (and
> expert) hacking by a knowledgeable administrator. If you
> follow through with your article, you should ask others if
> they know of any crash recovery products in the Linux
> world, and if none are found, a not-too-gentle prodding
> would seem to be in order.
You are looking for a commercial solution for something that is
already built into Linux. Here is what I do.
I have extra hard drive in the computer and periodically I make
a backup of my running hard drive. I just do a tar of each
filesystem, and save the tarfile to the spare drive. On a
THIRD drive I have a minimal linux system, or sometimes I use
a rescue diskette with tar on it (most seem to come with CPIO
which will not work).
In case of corruption, I boot the floppy linux or use a boot
floppy to boot it on the spare hard drive. I then format the
old hard drive (or replace it, partition it and reformat it),
then I untar the backup files into each partition.
The reason I use tar and not cp or cpio is because those two
programs have some ownership/permission/empty directory problems.
For instance, cpio works fine except it does not copy empty
directory trees. cp has similar problems and also does not
like to preserve proper permissions and ownerships in a reliable
manner. Tar has none of this misbehavior. The cpio options
that tell it to do something actually misbehave. The command
line arguments to tar are tricky, but if you are interested I
can email them to you or post here to the list. I have done so
in the past, and I am weary of doing so because RedHat does not
archive this list so I have to keep repeating myself.
===
Subject: Re: kmem_alloc : Bad slab magic (corrupt) name = buffer_head
From: Russ Pitman <rjpp@eisa.net.au>
Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 20:27:41 +1100 (EST)
On Fri, 12 Mar 1999 jjo@luna3.lc.lucent.com wrote:
> Do you have a procedure for doing the backups and the reapplying
> them after you re-install?
Hi, Backups are highly dependent on hardware/costs/prejudices.
Try Linux Gazette issue 32 at
http://www.ssc.com/lg
for a very good article on backups by V.Stemen,author of the bu utility.
I use it,it works. It is pretty straightforward,If it
interests you mail me if you want my setup.
===
Subject: Re: RH6 Sticker Shock
From: Chuck Gadd <cgadd@cfxc.com>
Date: Tue, 25 May 1999 15:05:09 -0600
Jim Morris wrote:
> We've already seen Redhat *drop* major "features" just in the change
> from Redhat 5.1 to 5.2. The one that bit me in the ass was that I
> sold a customer on using Linux for a server, telling them that a
> commercial backup tool was supplied in the box. I *BID* a job that
> way - Redhat 5.1 included a "personal" version of BRU.
I've seen several people upset about the dropping of BRU. But I'd
guess that it wasn't RedHat's move. It was probably the maker of BRU,
Enhanced Software Technologies. They decided they wanted to get paid
for their tool.
===
Subject: Re[2]: RH6 Sticker Shock
From: Jim Morris <Jim@Morris.net>
Date: Tue, 25 May 1999 23:19:08 -0500
Hi John,
The version of BRU on the "applications" CD is a 30-day trial version
of the full BRU. I.e. not a licensed copy of BRU Personal Edition, as
had been included in Redhat 5.0 and 5.1. This kind of change in what
was in the box from 5.1 to 5.2, with no announcement ever made, is the
one major complaint I have had against Redhat. I don't care what
*reason* they had for pulling BRU out - they should have clarified
that it was no longer included in 5.2, prior to pre-selling thousands
of copies.
===
Subject: Re: Moving /home from sda5 to sdb1
From: Ramon Gandia <rfg@nook.net>
Date: Mon, 07 Jun 1999 22:09:14 +0000
Steve Borho wrote:
>
> On Mon, Jun 07, 1999 at 01:59:15PM -0700, Ron Farrer wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > I have a 2GB drive that is about 70% full and decided to add another
> > one. So I now have two 2GB drives (SCSI-2, BTW). The second drive is
> > installed and working fine (created one primary partition using the
> > whole drive starting at 32 and ending at 4196351 and formatted it ext2).
> > I would now like to move /home (and all sub dirs) from the primary
> > partition on the first drive - sda5 to sdb1. Can anyone provide me with
> > a step by step guide on how to do this?
>
> mke2fs /dev/sdb1 # you did this already
>
> mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt
> cd /home
> find . -depth -print | cpio -pamd /mnt
> # go get a cup of coffee
> du /home ; du /mnt # these two numbers should be similar
> umount /mnt
> mv /home /home.old
> mkdir /home
> echo "/dev/sdb1 /home ext2 defaults 1 0" >> /etc/fstab
> mount /home # verify everything is ok now
> rm -rf /home.old
Unless cpio has been fixed in the last six months, it does
not copy empty directories....they need to have at least
one file in order to copy.
We found cpio useless for backup purposes due to this glitch.
Tar, however, works perfectly.
Contact me for the tar commands (they are not totally obvious)
in order to copy things over and preserve permissions, ownerships,
and empty directory structures.
===
Subject: Re: Amanda backup tool
From: Ray Curtis <ray@ray.clark.net>
Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 00:14:52 -0400 (EDT)
>>>>> "ab" == Anthony Baratta <Anthony@Baratta.com> writes:
ab> Bill Carlson wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, 5 Apr 1999, Bret Hughes wrote:
>>
>> > Since we are starting a backup discussion, I would be interested in
>> > hearing the pros and cons of using AMANDA to perform backups. It appears
>> > to use dump, tar and gzip to simplify backups over lans.
>>
>> Amanda works great for me, both at work and at play. Getting 95 clients
>> can be kind of a hassle, but can be done.
ab> To extend the thread....
ab> How would people rate BRU from Enhanced Software Technologies? RH 5.0
ab> came with a personal edition of BRU. I was looking at the Commercial
ab> version and it seems pretty complete. But don't know how it compares to
ab> AMANDA.
The personal edition of BRU won't do network backups or allow
different choices of achieve utilities such as tar, dump, cpio
like Amanda.
Amanda allows a very large to small network to be backed up, and
done in parallel with nice logging that can be viewed with
gnuplot to see transfer rates versus time etc, etc.
Streaming to a tape drive with Amanda, is one of its biggest
assets, IMHO.
Amanda is not meant for the one or two machine network, however will
work on it, also and not least it does take some time to configure
unlike BRU.
===
Subject: Re: Amanda backup tool
From: Anthony Baratta <Anthony@Baratta.com>
Date: Tue, 06 Apr 1999 21:34:04 -0700
Ray Curtis wrote:
>
> Amanda allows a very large to small network to be backed up, and
> done in parallel with nice logging that can be viewed with
> gnuplot to see transfer rates versus time etc, etc.
> Streaming to a tape drive with Amanda, is one of its biggest
> assets, IMHO.
I did a little digging and found the Amanda Home Page. A quick read
basically confirmed my choice to go with the commercial version of BRU.
I need tape spanning and Amanda does not provide that. Even with one
server I already have more drive space than a single tape. And since I'm
expecting to grow...well you get the picture.
Amanda seems like it will be a nice tool and I should note to revisit it
later as more functionality is added to it.
===
Subject: Re: Amanda backup tool
From: Jan Carlson <janc@iname.com>
Date: Wed, 07 Apr 1999 01:41:58 -0400
Anthony Baratta wrote:
>
BRU is first class. It's been popular for over 10 years
on every UNIX. The author of BRU is Fred Fish, one of
the key gcc contributors. BRU costs money, and it's
worth it IMHO.
===
Subject: Re: incremental tar files
From: Jan Carlson <janc@iname.com>
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1999 00:16:45 -0400
Scott Beale wrote:
> What is the correct syntax to create a tar file that only
> archives files after a specific date? I'm trying to do an
> incremental backup rather than tar up all the files again.
tar --help | less
tells you:
tar -cvf tarfilename --after-date="sept 1, 1999" /home
===
Subject: Re: backup software of arkeia
From: Timothy Reaves <treaves@silverfields.com>
Date: Tue, 23 May 2000 13:28:29 -0400
Mark Lo wrote:
> I have purchased RedHat Linux 6.2 professional edition, I would
> like to know do I need a license to run arkeia backup program.
Stay away from Arkeia. There is a known problem with large ( greater
that one gig) files. I found this out the hard way.
Try BRU.
===