Exploring the JDS Linux Desktop

Backing Up and Restoring Files and Folders

Some work environments provide robust and carefully tested procedures for backing up data on users’ systems, so that a failed disk or a slip of the hand on the mouse will not result in irretrievably lost data. But a surprising number of organizations do not provide adequate backups. Some back up their servers but not desktops. So you may be responsible for taking care of any data that’s important to you. And if you are using a computer system at home, you definitely need to perform your own backups.

JDS provides for data protection with a backup and restore facility. JDS File Backups and File Restores work in tandem to:

• Create a compressed archive of files and folders.

• Write the archive to one of several removable media types.

• Restore them later if necessary.

A compressed archive can be stored on your choice of:

• Floppies

• Zip disks

• CD-ROM disks

The compressed archive takes up less room than the original data does on your hard drive. For instance, if you put all your files in a single directory, it may take up 800 million bytes of data, or 800 megabytes. By using a program to compress them, they could be reduced to a size of only 80 megabytes.

We call the collection of those compressed files an archive. Archives take a collection of files and put them into a single file. So if you had 100 files in your documents directory and you compressed them into an archive, we could call that archive documents.tar.gz. We could then transfer the archive to off-line ...