fedora backup and recovery

great! awesome!

yes, i meant that i have a tape drive but don't know how to use it.

your script is very helpful. i was looking into using amanda which fedora provides, but this is very simple. how does this stack up against amanda?

Thank you so much.

also does this automatically rewind the tape and delete everything before writing on the tape?

I haven't used amanda, so I can't really say...

you can add an mt rewind at the front of the script if you want. when I pop a new tape in my drive, it automatically rewinds it. also, there's no real need to 'erase' what's on the tape, the current archive will overwrite whatever's there so it's not accessible anymore. if you like, you can add an mt offline at the end to automatically pop the tape out too...

great! thank you so much.

also i am doing full backup of the server. is this a good practise?

I have two separate backups...one for the 'data' which I do nightly...then the second one backs up the /etc, /root , /boot, etc and I only do that one once in a while (like after I've made changes). there are some dirs you won't want to backup, like /dev or /proc - they'll give you errors since they're not 'real files' in there...

thank you.

cheers, good luck...