On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 12:53 PM, Kevin Kempter kevin@kevinkempterllc.com wrote:
I'm looking for a clean way to backup my laptop in part so before I apply any updates I have a clean backup to revert to if needed.
I have a / and /home filesystems in order to backup before I run a set of updates from yum I suspect I need to backup / separately this way I dont need to restore my 22Gig of documents in /home if an update breaks something.
In the past I've gone onto single user mode and used dd to backup my HD
I wonder if running tar with the proper flags to ensure the following would be as effective
- restrict tar to the current(/) filesystem (i.e. disallow it from going
off into /home)
- ensure that tat picks up all the dot files
2 questions:
- is the above tar scenario sufficient to protect me from yum update
changes?
- anyone have suggestions per specific tar commands that will do the
operations specified above?
I wouldn't use dd for backups unless you wanted to restore an exact bit-by-bit image of an entire filesystem.
I've found rsync to be very effective, with the important advantage that you can run the backup several times and it will only copy what changed between one copy and the next. The rsync man page gives several examples of this. You might also be interested in rsnapshot, which basically wraps crontab scripts around rsync and can keep multiple time-related snapshots without wasting disk space.
poc