UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

I'm about to start a regular backup schedule for my Linux system.

I need some pointers if I may

The system is *mainly* used as a personal home computer (it's actually a laptop running SuSE 9.2) although I do host some client material from it being a PHP developer.

I know that in an *ideal* situation I should have /home on a separate disk but being a laptop this isn't true in my case.

So what I basically have, is a laptop which is pretty much running 24/7, with a 30GB hard drive and a fair few user accounts on it.

Because *most* of the stuff isn't business critical I feel that a once weekly backup will suffice. I want to backup EVERYTHING, not just /home for example. The idea being, if my single hard disk fails (and being Dell I almost know it will at some point - I work with these things in my job all the time) I can restore the whole system from the most recent backup without all the hassle of doing a full system reinstall and then restoring /home.

Problems/Questions:
I don't have enough space on the HDD to duplicate everything (I have about 8GB free) during the backup process.
Do I make tar files before copying to another media or simply copy the files?
I only have a CD-R drive to backup too, whats the best way to handle this?
Important: Can I do this while the system is runnning X Desktop or do i need it to be read from a Live CD?

I'm basically looking for advice on doing a FULL weekly backup onto separate CD's. Thanks,

d11

SuSE 9.2 Admin Guide - search for backup - note that they don't even mention cd's as a backup media. If you are being paid for a service, then legally, you may be liable.

Backing up to CD - you can do it, but you will not just restore these to a blank disk - you would probably have to do some set up. Note in his article, he does not backup everything meaning he would rebuild the system, restore system files that make his system unique, and then restore his data (home directory).

Thanks for pointing me the right way. I decided I'm going to end up with too many disks to put anywhere if I do a FULL backup weekly so what I'm doing instead is to backup the regularly changed stuff (/home and /MP3) weekly and the FULL backup once monthly.

I'm going to play with that BASH script on the link you posted and enhance it to suit my needs / automate a few more things as well as log the details of the backups somewhere.

Thanks again,

d11