HowtoForge - Linux Howtos and Tutorials - Backup

Ghosting The Machine

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 19:07:45 +0200

Ghosting The Machine

This is a short but potentially extremely handy guide to ghosting one Linux box to another (or simply making a full backup of a desktop/server). You might have a small office where you customise one desktop just how you like it and need to roll this out to N other PC's or simply want a backup of a server or desktop to another machine or even to an image file. The main tool here is netcat which is extremely powerful and has a multitude of other great uses that won't be covered here.

Disk Backup With Amanda On Debian Lenny

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 19:42:43 +0200

Disk Backup With Amanda On Debian Lenny

Amanda is an open source client/server solution to back up filesystems. Backups are triggered by the backup server, backup definitions are located on the servers but exclusion lists are located on the client.

Creating Encrypted FTP Backups With duplicity And ftplicity On Debian Lenny

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 17:02:39 +0200

Creating Encrypted FTP Backups With duplicity And ftplicity On Debian Lenny

When you rent a dedicated server nowadays, almost all providers give you FTP backup space for your server on one of the provider's backup systems. This tutorial shows how you can use duplicity and ftplicity to create encrypted (so that nobody with access to the backup server can read sensitive data in your backups) backups on the provider's remote backup server over FTP. ftplicity is a duplicity wrapper script that allows us to use duplicity without interaction (i.e., you do not have to type in any passwords).

Backing Up With rsync And Managing Previous Versions/History

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 21:21:07 +0200

Backing Up With rsync And Managing Previous Versions/History

This howto describes a method doing backups with rsync. This is done before, but this howto is also about managing previous versions, by copying to be changed and deleted items first to a history/version tree.

Ubuntu Server 9.04 Bacula Bweb GUI

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 13:31:10 +0200

Ubuntu Server 9.04 Bacula Bweb GUI

Bweb is a perl based web program that provides a tool to do basic operations and get statistics. It obtains its information from your catalog database and the bconsole program.

Creating MySQL Backups With AutoMySQLBackup On Ubuntu 9.10

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 12:05:23 +0100

Creating MySQL Backups With AutoMySQLBackup On Ubuntu 9.10

AutoMySQLBackup is a shell script that lets you take daily, weekly and monthly backups of your MySQL databases using mysqldump. It can back up multiple databases, compress the backups, back up remote databases, and email the logs. This tutorial explains how to install and use it on an Ubuntu 9.10 server.

NTFS Disk Recovery

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 18:04:46 +0100

NTFS Disk Recovery

Mary, the daughter of a friend is in college: her Windows XP laptop constantly reboots and, we suspect, has a bad hard drive. The system will boot a live CD (Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Desktop), and data on the hard drive can be read. During boot, the live CD identifies disk errors and tries unsuccessfully to repair them.

How To Back Up MySQL Databases With mylvmbackup On Debian Lenny

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:48:35 +0100

How To Back Up MySQL Databases With mylvmbackup On Debian Lenny

mylvmbackup is a Perl script for quickly creating MySQL backups. It uses LVM's snapshot feature to do so. To perform a backup, mylvmbackup obtains a read lock on all tables and flushes all server caches to disk, creates a snapshot of the volume containing the MySQL data directory, and unlocks the tables again. This article shows how to use it on a Debian Lenny server.

Automated Backups Using dhcpd On Ubuntu

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:07:34 +0200

Automated Backups Using dhcpd On Ubuntu

This tutorial shows how to set up automated backups of Linux hosts through dhcp using Ubuntu.

Creating Backups With Back In Time On An Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 19:37:07 +0200

Creating Backups With Back In Time On An Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop

This tutorial explains how to install and use Back In Time on an Ubuntu 9.04 desktop. Back In Time is a simple backup tool for Linux inspired from "flyback project" and "TimeVault". The backup is done by taking snapshots of a specified set of directories.

Creating Backups With luckyBackup On An Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 17:39:25 +0200

Creating Backups With luckyBackup On An Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop

This tutorial explains how to install and use luckyBackup on an Ubuntu 9.04 desktop. luckyBackup is an application for data back-up and synchronization powered by the rsync tool. It is simple to use, fast (transfers over only changes made and not all data), safe (keeps your data safe by checking all declared directories before proceeding in any data manipulation ), reliable and fully customizable.

Creating Snapshot-Backups with BackerUpper On Ubuntu 9.04

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 17:24:40 +0200

Creating Snapshot-Backups with BackerUpper On Ubuntu 9.04

BackerUpper is a tool similar to Apple's TimeMachine. It is intended to create snapshot-backups of selected directories or even your full hard drive. From the BackerUpper project page: "Backerupper is a simple program for backing up selected directories over a local network. Its main intended purpose is backing up a user's personal data." This article shows how to install and use BackerUpper on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope).

Management Of Backups With DAT Devices

Tue, 19 May 2009 13:24:20 +0200

Management Of Backups With DAT Devices

I had the chance to use a DAT device (an old HP SuperStore DAT24) to make copy on tapes. I didn't want to install any new software to manage that task. This guide can be considered a first step to know how the thing can work. Then, everybody can customize it according to the personal needs.

DRBD 8.3 Third Node Replication With Debian Etch

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 14:23:05 +0100

DRBD 8.3 Third Node Replication With Debian Etch

The recent release of DRBD 8.3 now includes The Third Node feature as a freely available component. This document will cover the basics of setting up a third node on a standard Debian Etch installation. At the end of this tutorial you will have a DRBD device that can be utilized as a SAN, an iSCSI target, a file server, or a database server.

Back Up LVM XEN Guest Containing LVs

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 14:19:57 +0100

Back Up LVM XEN Guest Containing LVs

In my day-job all our Linux boxes (bar 3) are Xen VMs. I wanted a way to take a backup of these with out the risk of the files changing underneath. For performance reasons I am running all of them on Logical Volumes.Within these VMs the DomU OS is once again using LVM for various reasons. This does create some headaches for taking the backup.