hi ,all

I am trying out all the things about linux , bit by bit , until this moment , I begin really love linux, what I would like to learn and get help is about now is systm backing up ,

1. what to backup ?, so if linux fail and I got to reinstall everything from reformat- repartition- reinstall, that I can get back most of my software that I have installed and configured easily ?

- what are tools that I can use ? ( I have not yet setup my cd writer yet , what CD-writer tools I can use (easy tool?)

- what directory and what things , I need to be carefull and backup regulary?


2. The other days , I ask for help of my RH8, I got feedback from user to get updates from RH8 website , I did that and registered the account , but seems like I can't download anything unless I am a paid , registed user , so what are the things that I can update , or download to my pc and apply update ?

thanks .

Create a gziped Image of a Partition and write to cd:
dd if=/dev/hda1 | gzip | cdrecord -dao -v -dummy dev=/dev/sg0 speed=4 -data -
The option -dummy is for testing purpose. cdrecord reads from stdin '-' .You can't mount this cd but with
dd if=/dev/hdc | gzip -d > /dev/hda1
you can write it back to hd.
These are no graphical tools you might be used to in windows but they are much more powerfull. dd is an essential Backup prog under Linux.Its easy to use it in cronjobs or build it into shell scripts.Get used to it, read a few howtos and you wont miss the windows stuff.
http://www.linux-backup.net

Well I do a filesystem backup with dump and the restore with the restore command. Check the man pages of those two to find out more information!

I am looking into backup options... tried a dump of one directory onto a second hard drive just to see what it was like.

I mounted the 2nd hard drive and ran:
dump 0f /dev/hdb /var/www
It seemed to run okay. When I tried to mount /dev/hdb again, it gave the message:
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdb, or too many mounted file systems. It mounted and unmounted fine about 10 times before I ran the dump. I dont understand what happened.

Also, since I'm an old windows person, is there any way to see that dump file? Perhaps since I'm not able to mount hdb, that is why. But if I were to see it, what name would it have?

Thanks.

You could always use "restore -i" to take a peek.

I could do that. I just like to be able to see what files get created.

Also, after I ran the dump, and could not mount the hard drive, I rebooted. Low and behold, I could not reboot, as /dev/hdb had a bad superblock. It dropped me to the shell. There I did a mkfs on /dev/hdb, and then exited the shell. It rebooted fine then, my primary drive was unchanged.

So, maybe using dump is not for me.

When you backed up /var/www you overwrote the existing file system on /dev/hdb with a dump file.

Ah, so can you only dump to a tape, or to a CD, or some other media? I still think it's strange that the dump caused my 2nd hard drive to be detected as bad. And, why would Linux not boot up if the 2nd hard drive is bad... the primary was still just fine.

If you want to have a tool with a graphical interface, you can use the backup module of webmin.

You can download Webmin from www.webmin.com if you don't already have it.

Also, you can use this useful tool to administer your whole server/computer.

Cheers.

A friend told me about webmin... hmm, I am going to have to get that. Looks like it even has a Sendmail configuration option... wow, maybe I'll go to sendmail then, from postfix.

Thanks.

It was complaining about the file system in particular, not the drive. When you did the dump to /dev/hdb, you overwrote the file system with a dump file. When you rebooted, mountd was expecting a file system not a dump file in that location. You could try mounting /dev/hdb as /backups or somthing and then backing up to /backups/backup.dat instead of /dev/hdb.