Screaming Penguin

Backup is an essential and integral part of any real system administration scheme. In many instances backup is critical. Even with fault tolerant hardware problems still arise in which backup is the only respite. That said, it is amazing how many sysadmins and individuals have either no backup method, an outdated backup, or have never verified a supposed backup strategy. Without a disaster recovery test there is no way to tell how good your backup is or is not. Dont wait until true disaster time to find out (this sounds like the most basic of advice and common sense, but countless times, last weeks full backup was not really a backup at all, make sure it works by restoring something.) Backup under Linux can be as complicated as you want to get, or it can be easy, remember, its the results that matter. Backup with taper and or tar, etc can be done with some fancy scripting, but why bother (understand the underlying technology but there is no need to do it all yourself.) Use a GUI backup tool. My favorites, and hence ToTSP certified apps are kdat and BRU. Kdat is the free tar archive GUI that is available for the KDE desktop. kdat is cheap (free), fast and works great. BRU is commercial software, and has a lot more functionality than kdat. BRU allows GUI based scheduling, backup verification, crash recovery and more. Kdat is a great thing and is gaining ground on commercial products with each new rev, but BRU is the gem of Linux GUI backup if you can afford the personal verision list price of $89.99. Its against my philosophy to recommend commercial software, but when it is priced this reasonably for a solid product I make exceptions. Check out the features of both more in depth via the links, pick one and make sure your backups are doing the job.   kdat