My right hand is damaged temporally. I am going to cut this short.

I got a Web Server running great. But I need to back it up. It doesn't for some reason detect either of my USB External HD's. How can I make a TAR or something and burn it to DVD and then be able to restore using that disk. Thank U in advance.

Centos 5

Hello,

Got this result in 0,24 seconds using Google:
Backup data on RHEL/CentOS to DVD
I believe that'll answer your questions Also the man page for tar can shed some light in the darkness:
Kind regards,

Eric

thanks for the info. Glad I got a response that fast. I will follow those instructions and give you the results.

If you have a second machine with a working drive, you can use netcat to transmit the data over the network and write it to disk on the remote machine.

A word of caution, be careful with file permissions and make sure that they get saved and restored correctly. Sometimes, especially if you use compression, you need to set extra flags for this purpose.

If you want to make an entire image of the machine or partition, dd can be very useful for this purpose. By first filling the unused space with zeros and then using compression, you can deflate the drive image down massively.

I like this reply and I am interested in it very much. Could U either tell me how or show me a link to work on it? Sounds kinda like two servers work together (lack of the real word) I'm tired obviously. This time of night CST. I see it as redundancy Please reply. Thank you.

Here is a pretty good link that shows how to accomplish this. The Wikipedia link looks really good too. It also has some tips regarding how to periodically receive the status of the operation by suspending and resuming the process.

Basically, netcat is used to create a raw stream from one machine to another. You combine this with the dd program which will read a partition or an entire drive, byte by byte and pipe the output through the netcat pipe. You can also combine this with a compression algorithm, such as bzip or gzip to both compress the data stream and the image so that it takes less transfer time and less storage.

You can also make creative use of dd to fill up the unused space of the hard drive, prior to this operation. This will allow you to greatly deflate the amount of storage required because the whole blocks of zero data can be compressed to a small amount. This is shown in the Wikipedia link above, but you simply create a blank file with 'touch file.tmp' and then fill it with 'dd if=/dev/zero of=file.tmp bs=1M' The operation will 'error out' when the disk is full and then you can simply erase the file.

On the sending end, you will want to use a live CD instead of running from the hard drive being imaged. In fact you won't even want the partition/drive being imaged to be mounted. You also need to be *VERY* careful with the DD command. It takes a few parameters, most notably the IF (input file) and OF (output file), works on a very low level and is not forgiving. If you get these wrong, you WILL LOSE your information. This is why it is highly recommended that you back up critical data before using this command.

I use a utility called Mondoarchive.

It'll do bare metal restores from media (CD or DVD).

It'll install via RPM, also