Hi all,

I am wondering if someone could give some advice on backing up my system in case of an emergency.

System so far is running Ubuntu 8.04LTS(no gui) and currently have a 2 disk raid0 setup.

The machine is currently my ftp server / mail server / ldap server / NFS & Samba server amongst other things and it is in use 24/7.

What I would like is a total backup solution to grab all data and also hardware configurations should something go terribly wrong.

Every night I run an incremental tar backup of the home dirs and at the weekend I run a tar of the whole system and store these files offline onto an online storage area.

But not sure if this would also restore my applications / settings etc etc in Ubuntu should I need to restore the OS???

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Rgds

I believe the full backup that you do on the weekend of the whole system would indeed restore all of your applications/settings, etc. Most of the settings for the stuff you've mentioned (Samba, mail, ftp) are stored in the /etc directory under the appropriately-named sub-directory. Hardware info and things like your drive layout, etc. would also be stored in various files here. So, after installing your OS some of these files could simply be dumped back into the system for easy recovery, while others would really be used as a reference point I think (like remembering how your drives were laid out). For example, I don't think you could just dump the contents of the /dev file because the system will assign different values to the hardware in a new install, but you could copy the /etc/fstab directory I believe provided you change the UUIDs to match whatever values the new system has given to your drives.

HTH

No backup strategy can be considered reliable until you have tested it.

I know this to my own cost (I got the system back, eventually, but I really, really wished I had tested it before I relied on it, because it was a nightmare).

So, get yourself another PC.

Pretend your functioning hardware is broken.

Restore from your "backup".

Does it work?
Is all your data intact?

If not, you need to re-think your strategy.

8.04 is old, so I think it is high time you considered this seriously. Hardware failure might be imminent even if 8.04 is still running sweetly.