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Backing Up is Hard to Do?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the especially-if-you're-lazy dept.

Joe Barr writes "NewsForge is running a story this morning on a personal hardware/software backup solution for your Linux desktop (NewsForge is owned by Slashdot's parent OSTG). The solution doesn't require a SCSI controller, or tape drive, or the ability to grok a scripting language or archiving tool to work, either. It's based on point-and-click free software. Plus it includes a dead-parrot joke by Linus Torvalds."

8 of 299 comments (clear)

  1. Backup painful? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Backing up isn't painful, restoring is.

  2. super compression by supergwiz · · Score: 3, Funny

    Someone taught me a cool trick to backup up all files with the highest possible compression ratio and speed: mv * /dev/null

    1. Re:super compression by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      I just tried that, where did it backup my file to? I can't find them.

    2. Re:super compression by Steffan · · Score: 5, Funny
      I just tried that, where did it backup my file to? I can't find them.
      That's easy, just use:
      cat /dev/zero > /dev/hda
      to get all of the zeros back. (The compression used takes care of all of the ones for you).
    3. Re:super compression by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      v1.1 (same ratio, improved speed)

      echo "backup completed"

    4. Re:super compression by Valdukas · · Score: 2, Funny

      And hey, you can probably even restore it... But that's what you want, right? Fast backup and slow restore process... with hex tools on /dev/hda

  3. KDar? by MonkeyCookie · · Score: 5, Funny

    Is that some kind of sense that allows you to pick out other KDE users in a crowd?

  4. What? by MattHaffner · · Score: 2, Funny
    That's really cool, but it's a write-only backup...

    You can read from /dev/null just fine:
    # for x in *; cp /dev/null $x; done
    will restore a whole directory's worth of files back to what's stored in the backup. If you want to make an exact copy of the whole filessytem stored in the backup:
    # rm -rf /; cp /dev/null .
    Now, that's just off the top of my head, so I won't take any blame (or credit) if you try that out on your own system.