Making regular backups is an essential part of your data protection strategy and there are many ways to implement it, depending on your infrastructure, backup needs, and available tools. Some commonly-used strategies are disk cloning and disk imaging. Out of these, we’ll talk in-depth about disk imaging in this article, including the tools you can […]
8 Best Disk Imaging Software
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. […]
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 […]
Using Tar to Upgrade Your Hard Drive
This is a story about a whale. No!! This is a story about making my computer happy. A few days ago, I started having weird problems on my main workstation, srv-1. My system would lock up completely. Only by pushing the reset button could I wake her from her slumber. I reseated all of the […]
The Archive Bit And Incremental Backups on Windows Filesystems
The archive bit is used to determine what files have been backed up up previously on a Windows filesystem. The bit is set if a file is modified. A backup program can then clear the bit when it does a full backup. This allows the backup program to do an incremental or differential backup that […]
Creating a Recovery Partition
If you have the ability to stick a second drive in your workstation or server, it can make a great recovery tool. True, there are a lot of CD recovery distributions out there, but the approach we use here will actually fit on a 100 Meg Zip disk. Further, it is portable to virtually any […]
Software RAID on Windows 2003 – Part1
There are 5 parts to this article: Part1 – Part2 – Part3 – Part4 – Part5 This series of articles will show how to set up software RAID on a Windows Server 2003 system. Before you do anything with your disks, make sure you have a good backup. Please read our terms of use. We […]
Using Arkeia for Linux Backup
If you have a single Linux file server that you want to back up, and maybe a client or two, you can use the full featured Arkeia for free. This is particularly useful for home use, or if you are migrating to Linux in your shop and wish to just back up one server. Arkeia […]
Software RAID on Windows 2003 – Part2
There are 5 parts to this article: Part1 – Part2 – Part3 – Part4 – Part5 We are warned that filesystems on the disks to be converted need to be dismounted: The system will need to reboot: Confirm reboot: At this point, add a drive. After the system reboot, go back in to computer management/disk […]
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 […]
