The YAST backup routine really sucks.

I'm kind of looking for a gui frontend for tar, all tho something that works like the Ghost server would be nice as well. I have a server running 10.2, and a notebook running 10.3. I have a terabyte external drive, and a 500 gig USB drive. Basically I want to backup to the terabtye drive, then I'll occasionally copy files over to the USB drive to take off-site.

I know this question has been asked dozens of times here, but it never hurts to get more information.

Any suggestions?

Norton ghost will work on your SuSE, it is just after you restore your partition, you will need to go back to your partition table and reconstruct it since Ghost will mess up the order. Clonzilla is another one that will work!

I use the PartedMagic Live CD for utilities, and it has XArchiver which seems to do the job. I've just upgraded a desktop by adding more RAM & replacing a 40Gb drive with and 80Gb. I used XArchiver to copy the partitions to a USB drive and replace them on the new drive and it worked OK.

I used CloneZilla to make an image of the Suse root partition and replace that, but there were problems, I think to do with the drive geometry. The help is not very clear.

Well, I'm replacing all my Windows computers with Linux, so I'd like to find something Linux based.

The PartitionMagic Live CD won't boot my AMD X2 notebook. But Knoppix will boot, I'll have to see if it has XArchiver.

Ah, what the heck. I used this tar command to back up my 10.2 server.

tar cvfz /media/disk/VentureBackups/010708.gtar -X /media/disk/VentureBackups/exclude .

Anyone know what this error means?

tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
You have mail in /var/mail/doug
#

And how the heck do I get rid of that "You have mail". You know what absent mindly type "mail" there does to my Kontact e-mail?

When you are using tar to archive directories and/or files, the usage should be,
# tar cvfz file_you_would_like_to_create Source_Location

For example, if I would like to tar the whole root / directory, I would do
# tar cvfz 010708.tar /
Or if you would like to gzip it concurrently, you do
# tar cvfz - / | gzip -9 > 010708.tar.gz

In your case, it will be,
# tar cvfz - / | gzip -9 > /media/disk/VentureBackups/010708.tar.gz

Your command put "-" at the end, that means your source would be standard output. However, there was no standard output in your case, which is why you see the error message.

Guys,

Please correct me when proper. I think backing up Linux system should be an easy task. The easiest case would be copying all system files out to another drive or partition, and save the boot sector.

After installing new hardrive or devices, simply copy the system files back, and restore the boot sector, namely the grub loader or LILO. Then it's done.

That said, we should just boot up using a live cd, and mount the system partition, tar it and compress it to an external hard drive. use
dd if=/dev/hdx of=external_destination.img bs=512
to copy the boot sector.

Then replacing the hard drive, partition in a right order, and put the data back, then
dd if=external_destination.img of=/dev/hdx
to restore the boot sector. And everything is done.

The thing is I am not sure how big the boot sector is for grub loader and LILO. The size 512 bits was from DOS boot partition.

Well, the problem with using the slash instead of the dot is that using the slash makes it hard to restore a file into a different directory.In most cases when you're restoring just a few files you don't want it overwriting the live files.

Of course, you do have to cd into root.

Also, I can't see how you can do without an exclude file. My /media directory has over 500 gb.

What's the advantage of piping it to gzip instead of just using the z option on tar?

Does tar back up the /dev files correctly?

What you can do is change directory to root / and then give the command with dot .

Pipe it to gzip let you have option to choose compression ratio. Without it, the regular -z option only use average compression ratio.

You can still exclude files or directories, just using --exclude-from or --exclude for your files and directories. Just make sure if you are using pipe, place the options before pipe.

For the /dev/files, they are just device files, and normally when the system is booting up, the system will check if these device files are valid, if not they will be deleted or modified accordingly. At least it should be the case for Redhat and SuSE linux. Therefore, even though the files will be backed up, they don't matter. Of course, if I am wrong, someone please correct me.

When you executed the command above, you had one line, right?
In which directory were you residing in? Did you place the right file in the right format in your
-X /media/disk/VentureBackups/exclude file?

Initially I thought you place "-" (standard output) at the end, but now I see you actually put -X switch at the end, so your command should have worked. However, if you are tarballing the whole directory while the contents are still changing, you will see the same error message. Make sure that nothing is accessing and replacing the contents of the directories and files you are trying to back up. Or you will have to place those files in the exclude file.

By the way, /tmp, /var/log, /var and etc are always changing while you are backing up the running system.

Well, the tar command worked, I saw all the directories getting backed up. I just got that error at the end.