Linux Troubleshooting Bible

Backup TypesBackups can consist of tar-balling your data up and sticking it on another server, dumping a live filesystem to tape, or e-mailing yourself 562MB uuencoded tar files to be reassembled at home. Although none of these are really p...

Which Backup Strategy Should You Use?So incremental backups are great in that they use less tape, but you need ALL of them plus the full backup tapes to do a restore. Differentials are great because you only need the latest tape, plus the f...

Backup Strategies Before you decide how you want to backup your system(s), you need to ask yourself some basic questions: "What can I not afford to lose?" "How much money could it cost my company if this data was irretrievable?" "How long ...

Backup Tools and How to Use ThemThis section covers the basic backup tools that come with most all Linux distributions, explains how they work, and discusses the pros and cons of each. Tar or Star Tar is short for Tape ARchive and i...

Backup ExamplesYou've got the theory of backups under your belt, and you know some of the tools. Now let's get down to it and start giving some examples of useful methods in which to perform various types of backups. Using Tar Locally ...

Testing and Doing RestoresNever restore files back into their original location! Doing so is wrong and can crash your system even worse than a regular crash. If you use tar or dump, always create a special RESTORE directory wherein you put ...

Server Migrations Sometimes you just need to back up everything, reinstall a new or different OS, and restore all your data onto the new server load. This can be done, but it's tricky when you're not going right back into the exact same en...

Backup-Related Resources Table 5-4 provides a list of resources for more information on backups. ...

SummaryRunning production-grade backups takes a lot of planning, pricing, and consideration of policies on things like data retention and tape rotation issues. Doing it well in a large enterprise often draws on technical coordination among ...