Forwarded message: request for help

[jrv at mbunix.mitre.org (Jim Van Zandt)]

Dan Demus asks:
>So what do you recommend for backup on Linux?  tar or cpio?  dump?
>NFS via ISP?

It depends on the hardware available.

I use a Zip drive.  I put together five scripts to do backups.  Each script
uses cp to copy a portion of my directory tree to one zip volume.  This 
makes it very simple to access the backups - I can just mount a volume 
and use the normal file handling programs (find, ls, etc.).

In general, cpio is nicer than tar because you can use the full power
of find to select the files to be backed up.  (There is also supposed
to be some kind of special file which cpio can reconstruct but tar
cannot.) On the other hand, I at least am much more familiar with tar
since it's also used to distribute software packages.  

If you want to use compression with tape, afio is better than either
cpio or tar since it compresses each file, and if you have an I/O error
you lose only one file.  (I attempted to use ftape for over a year.  I
eventually gave up, but in the mean time learned a lot about error
recovery.)

I would expect NFS via SLIP or PPP to be too slow.  I have done backups
via NFS over an Ethernet - not too bad.  It's also possible to do afio
or cpio (or even tar) backups to a remote device using rsh.  There's a
remote backup (but not remote restore) example in the afio distribution.

I don't know about dump.

                    - Jim Van Zandt