Which backup program should one use? Was Re: Risks of backing up live mounted filesystems using dump(8)

[Tim]

On Mon, 2010-03-01 at 16:48 -0600, Rick Sewill wrote:
> I've been confused what backup program, dump or tar, to use.
>  
> At first, I was using dump to back up my partitions.

I might throw another suggestion in:  One of the RAID techniques where
several drives are mirrors of each other.

Once you flush databases to disc, you have several virtually identical
drives.  You can pull out one (or more) and put it on the shelf as your
backup, and insert a new drive (which you'll add to the raid, and turn
it into yet another mirror of the other drives).

As a recovery process, the reverse is implemented.  You pull out your
current drives with a broken system, and fire up from your backup drives
you had sitting on your shelf.

As with all backup techniques, it's then up to work out how bridge the
difference between when you made your backup and when the failure
occurred.  But with a well set up RAID, you mightn't have a failure that
you need to recover from, in the first place; presuming we're talking
about random drive failures, rather than someone doing something stupid
on the computer.

-- 
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2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

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