Backing up a Linux (or Other *nix) System

bigsmoke writes "My buddy Halfgaar finally got sick of all the helpful users on forums and mailing lists who keep suggesting backup methods and strategies to others which simply don't, won't and can't work. According to him, this indicates that most of the backups made by *nix users simply won't help you recover, while you'd think that disaster recovery is the whole point of doing backups. So, now he explains to the world once and for all what's involved in backing up *nix systems."

Comments

Re:Consistent backups

[Just Some Guy]

The '-L' option to FreeBSD's dump command makes an atomic snapshot of the filesystem to be dumped, then runs against that snapshot instead of the filesystem itself. While that might not be good enough for your purposes, it's nice to know that the backup of database backend file foo was made at the same instant as file bar; that is, they're internally consistent with one another.