Easy Backup and Restore

Until recently the extent of my backup efforts was to take the occasional CD copy of my home directory and keep copies of important files somewhere else, usually on another disk partition or a floppy disk. All of this changed with the need to run some Windows legacy applications. The only machine really suitable for this work was my main workstation, a 1.2GHz Athlon machine, multibooted with four distributions. I decided to free up the first primary partition, which held Mandrake 9.0, and set up a Windows partition.

I freed up the first primary partition by transferring its contents to the seventh partition, overwriting an expendable Vector Linux 3.0 Distribution. To be totally safe, I booted into Debian 3.0 and mounted both partitions to individual mount points in /mnt. Then, as root, I used tar and a pipe to copy everything, including all links and permissions, from the source partition to the target partition. A few minutes later, after changing my GRUB boot menu, I was able to boot into Mandrake 9.0 Linux in the seventh partition and verify that everything worked as expected.

At this point, one normally would DOS-format the now free first partition and install Windows. I began to feel a little uneasy, however. Windows could format the whole darn drive or some other similar screwup could happen, in which case I would be in the position of having to fdisk the partitions and reinstall everything from scratch. The original disks, of course, would have all the applications except for those extra packages installed by me, but all custom configurations would be lost.

The machine now was running Mandrake 9.0, Debian 3.0 and Slackware 8.1. Of these, only losing my Slackware install would cause me grief, as it has been running like a top, boots to KDE 3.0 in less than 30 seconds--including my sign on--and is absolutely rock-solid stable. It also has the CUPS printing system set up perfectly for all of my printers on the LAN. So I must retain this setup at all costs. The solution, of course, is to back up fully everything from the Slackware install.

At this point, the desire to have a simple, easy and foolproof backup and recovery method took hold.

If you are a home or SOHO Linux user, I suggest that your backup and recovery system should:

A quick review of past Linux Gazette articles and a search of the Web turn up hundreds of backup solutions. Many are aimed specifically at the backup function; others are aimed at the repair and system recovery part of the overall effort to get back to some predefined state. Virtually none are customized for your system or your specific requirements, so why not roll your own solution? That is what we do here.

Most home or SOHO users do not have a tape drive system and are unlikely to purchase one for the sole purpose of backup, given that the cost of the tape system and software probably exceeds that of the computer itself. This essentially narrows our options to backup to removable disk, backup to the same or another hard drive, backup to a CD or backup over a network to some other hard drive. This last option essentially is a more complicated backup to local hard drive option, except there is zero chance of it being lost when your system goes down. So let us look at these options: