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Pros and cons of doing a simple tar backup

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Donboy

IS-IT--Management
Aug 20, 2002
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I'm running RH9 with many different services available... apache, ProFTPd, qmail, Samba, etc etc.

These services + about 1 gig of user data live on a 30 gig drive with about 6 or 7 gig used that I want to backup. I have purchased a 60 gig USB drive that I have successfully mounted as a SCSI device (sda1). Now I'm wondering what sort of backup software to start using.

I have been told that Mondo does very good for backing up the whole thing, but I have tried using this and I'm unsure if I will be able to extract individual files from the backup to restore. It almost seems like Mondo is really only good for backing up and restoring the whole shebang and will not be able to restore individual files. Is that T/F?

I have looked at Norton Ghost, but this also seems to be the same deal.

Now I'm considering just doing a simple backup of the whole root directory (/) using tar and sending the tar file to the 60 gig drive. This drive has very little else on it, so obviously free space isn't a problem.

What are some of the caveats to running just a simple backup like this using tar. Will the permissions/ownership be intact if I restore one of the files from the tar backup? Are there any critical files that I should avoid backing up? Any other pitfalls I should know about?

I'm thinking about doing daily backups using tar, keeping the most recent 10 day's worth, and doing monthly's using Mondo just for good measure. Does this seem like a good strategy for me? Will I be able to restore corrupted programs (apache, ProFTPD, etc) from a tar file that I have made??? This is still a devel server, so I'm likely to break something and be in need of a quick restore. I'm relatively new to Linux and not sure what to expect.

Any advice welcome.
 
I do some FreeBSD backups using tar and it's ok. You have to be careful with your exclude list (if you use one) and you'll want to break down the backup into several smaller tarballs. Other than that, be sure to check your backups to ensure it includes everything. Some symlinks, etc may not be followed.

Good luck,

FredUG
 
I just wanted to follow up and say that I decided to go with "dar" which I'm finding to be an excellent program and nice upgrade from just tar. Very nice documentation too.

 
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