PostgreSQL is a highly stable, open-source relational database that helps decipher complex queries using JSON and SQL command language. The companies trust the relational database management system over the others due to its excellent features and robust performance. It is also backed by 20+ years of development by an open-source community and helps solve complex […]
Best PostgreSQL Backup Tools
Best Virtual Machine Backup Software
Today, most business networks use virtual machines due to their flexibility and cost-effectiveness. Having a Virtual Machine in an organization can help save on cost, enhance productivity, and ease provisioning. There are many reasons why companies consider virtual machines as a great resource. Over time, the use of virtual machines has increased. It also offers […]
7 Best Tools for Hyper-V Backups
Losing data can lead to a lot of inefficiencies and monetary loss within a business. Backing up physical data has been a mainstay of the business world ever since the age of floppy disks; however, many companies neglect the VM side of things. If a single VM or set of VMs fails, that can lead […]
8 Best Tools for VMware Backups
Security is the name of the game in the business world these days. But, unfortunately, this trend isn’t occurring simply due to the increased frequency of cyberattacks (though that contributes) and the chances of hardware failure. If you’ve got a storage array of VMs (Virtual Machines) and it fails, that will lead to all of […]
9 Best Disk Imaging Software
This list gives you comprehensive information about each tool and will guide you to choose a tool that fits your needs.
How to implement RAID 5 and RAID 1 with NT Server
Note: There is a much more current article on how to do this here. We have five hard drives, two SCSI controllers, and an external drive cabinet: (1) 3 Gig IDE in the CPU cabinet hooked up to the primary IDE channel (1) 4 Gig SCSI hard drive in the CPU cabinet hooked up to […]
Ftape configuration
Believe it or not, we have been struggling for almost four years to get our tape drive to work. We originally had an FC-20 with a 768 meg native 3020 Colorado tape drive. By the time the kernel and ftape had caught up to our model, we had replaced it with an Iomega Ditto Max […]
Scheduling backup of directories with tar and cron:
Tar is quite useful for copying directory trees, and is much more powerful than cp. To copy directory /home/myhome/myimportantfiles to /share/myhome/myimportantfiles: cd /home/myhome/myimportantfiles tar -cvf – . | tar -C /share/myhome/myimportantfiles/ -xv To schedule this to happen every day at 1am: crontab -e vi will run. If you are unfamiliar with vi, push ‘i’ to […]
Simple multi-tape backup with tar / Standby File/Print Server
We have a share available via NFS called share. All of our software, documents, versions of websites are on this share. It doesn’t contain any live systems stuff, but it is quite large. We bought a 15/30 gig DLT drive for cheap on Ebay, and some used DLT tapes to go with it. Many of […]
SYSLINUX
[Updated 8/27/02] SYSLINUX is a bootloader for Linux using MS-DOS floppies. It is good to learn how to create your own SYSLINUX recovery diskettes for disaster recovery. [On a related topic, check out SuperRescue CD. SuperRescue is an iso image you can burn to a CD. The CD is bootable and has a suite of […]
Quickie backup over the net with GNU tar
If you want to back up a bunch of files over a network (or locally), one approach is to go into the directory you want to back up, and execute: tar cvpf – . | tar xpv -C /share/backupetc092901 This will save permissions, as well as grab hidden files, dates, symbolic links, /dev stuff, etc. […]
Cloning Hard Drives with GNU/Linux
It is quite easy to clone identical hard drives using the dd command on GNU/Linux. Make sure that you put the source drive and destination drive in the system so that they don’t affect the boot. If you have a SCSI system, this is most likely done by making the SCSI IDs higher. With IDE, […]
Software RAID on Windows 2003 – Part3
There are 5 parts to this article: Part1 – Part2 – Part3 – Part4 – Part5 At the Initialize and Convert Disk Wizard dialog, check the disk you want to convert, and click next: Click finish to complete the Initialize and Convert Disk Wizard: There is now one healthy dynamic disk, and one unallocated disk, […]
Mirroring a Website Using rsync
If you would like to mirror a website, or any part of a filesystem over the Internet, you can use rsync over ssh. Here is an example: [opt]# rsync -e ssh -avz root@website.com:/opt/webroot /opt/ root@website.com’s password: receiving file list … done webroot/logs/web1.access webroot/logs/web2.access webroot/logs/web3.access webroot/logs/web4.access wrote 156644 bytes read 345589 bytes 3475.66 bytes/sec total size […]
Software RAID on Windows 2003 – Part4
There are 5 parts to this article: Part1 – Part2 – Part3 – Part4 – Part5 An error may pop up that says “Logical Disk Manager could not update the boot file for any boot partitions on the target disk. Verify your arcpath listings in file boot.ini or through the bootcfg.exe utility.” Well, we are […]
Software RAID on Windows 2003 – Part5
There are 5 parts to this article: Part1 – Part2 – Part3 – Part4 – Part5 Select the Disk to remove: Confirm: We now have a healthy Disk 0: Remove the missing drive: All is as it should be:
Using Dump to Migrate Hard Disks
One method to move filesystems around, particularly if you are moving your root filesystem, is to use dump. Dump is a lower level backup program than tar, but this also makes dump quicker, because it doesn’t have all of the overhead. Another advantage is that depth of directories, symlinks, etc. aren’t a big deal. In […]
Open Source Utility to Recover Lost Partitions and Fix Boot Problems
Famiarize yourself with TestDisk. It will run on many platforms, and supports many different kinds of partitions. We were able to compile the source on two different machines (GNU/Linux and Mac OS X Tiger). One problem with compiling on Mac OS X is that the ext2 libraries are not available. This was, of course, not […]
Bull-Headed Booting
One handy tool for booting linux systems and mounting the root partition is Loadlin. Now, Loadlin is *really* old, but there have been many times it has saved our sorry arses. You can get loadlin here. Loadlin needs some kind of *DOS on the floppy to boot from. MS-DOS 6.22 works fine; however, if you […]
Restoring Individual Files and Directories with Tar
One of our systems has a DLT drive we use for backup. It isn’t in a library, and we just use regular tar to back up our main share. Here are some pointers on restoring from tape with tar. First off, you need to specify the exact path from the perspective of the tar archive. […]
