[ltp] Suse Linux 7.3 Suport for Firewire & Pcmcia Firewire Adaptor on Thinkpad A20m

Tod Harter linux-thinkpad@www.bm-soft.com
Thu, 10 Jan 2002 17:31:33 -0500


I believe Ghost now supports linux as a client. 

As a backup solution though it seems somewhat brutal, block copying the 
entire drive across the network to the server. Ghost wasn't really designed 
as a backup solution. It would certainly work, but in practice you can't do 
any kind of incremental backups with it, and a good tar archive should be 
quite a bit more compact.

If you are a bit ambitious and fairly unix literate here is a scenario for 
backing up across a network using existing command line utilities that should 
work:

On the machine that you want to back up to fire up netcat in server mode and 
have it direct its output to a file (something like "daily.tar.gz" should 
work). Then on the client side simply do a tar, pipe the output to gzip, and 
pipe that to netcat with the proper parameters to have it send to the remote 
netcat. You can get the lowdown on netcat with "man nc". If you are slightly 
more ambitious you could set up an rexec or sexec command to fire up the 
remote copy of netcat from your workstation. If you use pubkey authentication 
with sexec you can completely automate the process and run it from cron. :o).

That just leaves you with the problem of how to do a restore. One method if 
you know how to create a bootable floppy or CDR would be to build a small 
system that could scp or ftp back to the server to recover your backup. 

cpio could of course be substituted for tar, as could bru if you require a 
more featureful system.

Naturally this can be elaborated on to your heart's content. You could 
automatically write your tarballs to tape, build file indexes, etc. All well 
within possibility with simple shell scripting. Ain't Linux wonderful? ;o).

(as a matter of fact you could use the dd command and this same strategy and 
make entire disk images to the server).
>
> I was also wondering if anyone has had any experience backing up linux
> using programs like Ghost from Symantec, if it works, or if there are some
> other programs available that will allow for me to take immages of my hard
> disk on my laptop and use them to restore if I do somethig silly.
>
> Thanks in advance again for your help, I hope that one day i will be able
> to help back.
>
>
> Shane Broomhall
> Brisbane Australia

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