Backing up whole system

[Robert L Cochran]

For just one or two systems I would use G4U by Hubert Feyrer ( 
http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/ ) or G4L by Michael D. Setzer II (please see 
his post in this thread.) I like to clone an entire hard disk and then 
store the clone offsite.

I have not used G4L enough to gain real experience with it. I should try 
to work with it enough to record a successful cloning action with G4L. 
With that said, my impression is that G4U adapts a little better to many 
but not all hardware setups. Hardware that G4U does not know about will 
render it unbootable or unusable. And very often, if G4U doesn't work on 
a given machine, G4L has trouble on it too. If both G4U and G4L do not 
work for me on a given machine, I move the disk I want to clone to 
another machine, and try to use G4U on that. If it seems to boot I go 
ahead with the cloning action.

I really should try to use G4L more often, too.

The up side of G4U/G4L is they both offer simple and quick cloning 
action without going through the $%^& of setting up certain dedicated 
backup software packages such as Amanda.

The down side of using G4U is that if you try to clone drive A to an 
external USB hard drive, the cloning action can take many hours. It is 
not quick. I have insufficient experience with G4L to discuss its 
performance.

I also use scp to copy important files to a network drive and while this 
is a backup, it is not an offsite backup. Very important difference. 
There are businesses like Web Hosting Talk which admit they made severe 
mistakes by not maintaining offsite backups. I should probably look into 
doing that.

Even homes now generally have more than one computer. Multiple laptops, 
one for each member of a family, are very common. I'd have to think 
about an effective backup strategy for those cases.

For nontechnical users one simply cannot use complex backup solutions 
though. I have enough experience to realize that. If the solution isn't 
simple and automatic it won't be used. For technical users, the same 
might apply, too, because tech people tend to be rather busy with tasks 
other than backup and recovery. A backup solution really needs to be as 
simple as turning a key.

Bob





On 05/09/2009 09:15 AM, GMS S wrote:
> What is the best and easy way to backup whole fedora 10?
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> Thanks.
> Fedora 10.
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