SAMS Teach Yourself Red Hat® Fedora™ 4 Linux® All in One

Backing Up and Restoring Your Data

By the time you have used Linux for a few months, you will have built a collection of important files of various kinds—important spreadsheets, documents in progress, web content, or any number of other types of files. What an annoyance—or worse—it would be to lose them!

Modern hard drives are remarkably reliable, especially when compared to the storage devices used by early computers. However, for every handful of users who have never lost an important file due to circumstance or hardware failure, there is at least one user who has seen hours and hours of work lost in the void. Users who suffer data loss inevitably regret not having made backups of their data.

A number of common types of backup media are in ...