A backup only makes sense if it is done automatically and easy to use. Otherwise one usually postpones it or forgets it at all or restores are nearly impossible. For Linux in particular, there are tons of free backup solutions. Some simple tools that are powerful yet not so simple to use on their own like tar or monsters like amanda that are terrible to set up. Often it is recommended to put a small shell script in a cron job and just use tar. This works reasonably well if you don’t need to restore anything quickly. BackupPC aims to fill the gap between selfmade scripts and enterprise class solutions like amanda. It backs up virtually all OSs across the net, offering transparent compression and a web interface to manage all backups.
To back up a full linux host one need’s to exclude a number of files and directories that are created automatically at boot time.
I have put a list in
‚*‘ => [
‚/proc‘,
‚/dev‘,
‚/tmp‘,
‚/mnt‘,
‚/media‘,
‚/sys‘,
‚/lost+found‘,
‚/var/lib/backuppc‘,
‚/var/lib/mythtv‘,
‚/var/tmp‘,
‚/var/cache‘,
‚/var/spool‘,
‚/var/run‘,
‚/var/lock‘,
‚/var/games‘,
‚/home‘
] };
http://kirksblog.steffensenfamily.com/
http://wiki.nerdylorrin.net/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=BackupPC
BackupPC is not very good with bare metal restores. It appears that if your host dies, you’ll have to reinstall a minimum linux, install backuppc and – here comes the tricky part – have your old backuppc config ready to pop in, so you can roll away. Then mount the partition holding the backups unde /var/lib/backuppc and fire up backuppc. afterwards you should be able to restore your machine.
As always, test this on your box before it dies.