February 2004
Beginner
200 pages
5h 40m
English
mt | Control a tape drive |
dump | Write a disk partition to tape |
restore | Restore the results of a dump |
tar | Read and write tape archives |
cdrecord | Burn a CD-R |
rsync | Mirror a set of files onto another device or host |
There are various way to back up your precious Linux files:
Copy them to a tape drive
Burn them onto a CD-R
Mirror them to a remote machine
Your tape backup device is usually /dev/ht0 for an IDE drive, or /dev/st0 for a SCSI drive (or for an IDE drive using ide-scsi emulation). It’s common to make a link called /dev/tape to the appropriate device:
$ ln -s /dev/ht0 /dev/tape
We aren’t presenting every Linux command for backups. Some users prefer cpio to tar, and for low-level disk copies, dd is invaluable. See the manpages for these programs if you are interested in them.