Fedora® 8 and Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® Bible

Chapter 13. Backing Up and Restoring Files

In This Chapter

• Doing a simple backup

• Selecting a backup strategy

• Selecting a backup medium

• Backing up to a hard drive

• Backing up files with dump

• Automating backup with cron

• Restoring backed-up files

• Backing up over the network with Amanda

• Performing network backups with multiple computers

• Using the pax archiving utility

If you've ever suffered a hard drive crash, you know just how aggravating it can be. You can lose irreplaceable data. You likely spend countless hours reinstalling your operating system and applications. It is not a fun experience. It need happen only once for you to learn the importance of making regular backups of your critical data.

Today, larger and faster backup media can simplify the process of backing up your data. Fedora and RHEL support many different types of media — such as writable CD (CD-R and CD-RW), DVD (DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD+RW, and DVD-RW), and magnetic tape — for creating backups. Using tools such as cron, you can configure backups to run unattended at scheduled times.

This chapter describes how to create a backup strategy and how to select media for backing up data on your Fedora or RHEL system. It tells you how to do automated backups and backups over a network. It also describes how to restore individual files, or entire file systems, using tools such as the restore command.

Making a Simple Backup Archive

Improvements in the GNOME desktop for handling removable media (CDs, DVDs, USB flash drives and so on) can help you ...