How to backup files?
 

Hi,
Our lab uses both Windows and Linux. It has been requested that we backup files on the network server.

The windows PCs here were setup with the network server while the Linux computer was not. I was told that it is possible to generate a similar database structure in Linux as in Windows so as to backup the files.

Please give us some ideas on how to do this.
Thank you very much.
Sincerely,
Yu

Hi.

Do you just want to backup certain files to a network share? If so, it is easy to do so. You would just need to mount the network share and copy the files from your Linux box to the network server.

For example... as root....

mount -o username=yu //192.168.0.1/share /mnt/network

enter your password,

and then copy the files you wish to backup to the /mnt/network folder.

In that example above you would need to change the IP to your network server, and also the username to a valid one.

If this works how you want it to, you can create a cronjob to perform this automatically for you whenever you like.

good luck.

Craig

yeah, what kind of backup do you mean?

howzit

to answer your quetion is a little difficult becuase it all depends on how your system has been configured. Is your server used to hold user information if so where? Is your server running specific services if so what? U see all this will decide what to backup.

Another quetion will be if u have a tape drive on the server or not. If so then u may use cpio/dump to backup. The other cmds u may look at are tar.

Before u start sit down and see what your server is used for e.g application, file server, etc. Then from that conclusion move to the next phase which is backup the data.

Or when in doubt backup / but that might be very time consuming and unecessary

cheers

Thank you for the info.
I used "cd .." a couple of times to get as back as I could and tried to mount the network drive.
But still got message " only root can do that".

Is there another way to get to the root?
Thank you.
Yu

[QUOTE]Originally posted by TheRealDeal
[B]Hi.

Do you just want to backup certain files to a network share? If so, it is easy to do so. You would just need to mount the network share and copy the files from your Linux box to the network server.

For example... as root....

mount -o username=yu //192.168.0.1/share /mnt/network
............

Our windows PCs use Novell networking; and the network server was mapped as the X:/ drive.
We would copy files from the C:/ to X:/ to backup.

That server was just used for extra memory.


[QUOTE]Originally posted by aqoliveira
[B]howzit

to answer your quetion is a little difficult becuase it all depends on how your system has been configured. Is your server used to hold user information if so where? Is your server running specific services if so what? U see all this will decide what to backup.

In this case when you get the message that "only root can do that" it means the superuser account (called called the "root" account) not the location in the file system called root (usually referred to as "/", without the quotes) I am guessing here, and maybe someone will correct me, but I guess that / gets it's name from being the beginning of the whole file system, and the root account gets its name from being the beginning of the all the user accounts.

You can mount at any location becuase everything goes under root, in one way or another, no matter how it gets there.