[Discuss] Possible backup scenarios for a 500GB drive

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2007-10-25 16:26-0700 John Blomfield wrote:

> I can understand why dump/ restore can be attractive to you and I am not 
> familiar with RIP usage but does it also allow you to restore individual 
> files or directories?

Restore allows individual file and/or partial directory trees or the full
file system to be restored from the compressed file created by dump.  One
problem with dump is that it is not completely reliable for an active
filesystem so the suggested way to use it is for filesystems that are
mounted read-only.  This works fine for say the /home filesystem (assuming
you have partitioned that separately), but obviously is a problem for
dumping the OS filesystem (/usr, /etc and so forth). The solution is to use
RIP (Recovery Is Possible), a highly recommended RAM-resident rescue distro,
which allows you to mount the OS disk partition(s) read-only and dump it
(them) reliably.

> In the end had to do a clean new install of Fedora 6.

Debian is supposed to be pretty good about how it deals with old
configuration files during distribution upgrades, but even for that distro I
use the strategy of clean installs rather than upgrades.  (Perhaps I got
into this habit because in the old days I used slackware and RedHat where
clean installs were always preferred over upgrades.)

> I 
> now backup just /home/ and /etc/ separately and restore just the stuff that 
> is needed. I plan to partition my drives to simplify this process the next 
> time I try a new distro version and have a separate partition and directory 
> for applications that are not included in the distro or that I write myself.

Good idea.  I suggest you separate at least the OS partition from the /home
partition for your next partitioning scheme.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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