>I have a single server and I need to perform full-backup every time. I
>tryed and it had success with both dump (always-full) and tar (root-tar).
>
>Now I want to ask you wich advantages and disadvantages has every one of
>this methods? Why should I use one of them and not the other? ...
If I understand your question, you're asking which is better, dump or
tar. Is that correct?
That's a religious argument :-) that has been "discussed" (to put it
mildly) on this list in the past.
Without starting that war again, and trying hard to not let my own
preference shine through, here are some points to consider:
* Tar may be more tolerant of an active file system, i.e. files changing
out from under it.
* Tar allows you to exclude items (if you can figure out the syntax :-).
* Tar allows you to do backups of things smaller than a whole file
system (subdirectories).
* Dump may be a little more efficient, especially in the estimate phase.
* Dump does not alter any meta-data of the files it backs up -- tar
updates the access time.
>Since don't have much experience with backups, I think it's a good ideea
>to learn how to restore from tape before an undesired event to happen. ...
Planning ahead for a disaster would make you unique :-) :-) :-).
>... what I want now is to test to restore an entire
>directory (4 GB) which holds the most important thing on my computer.
>...
>The problem is that, obvioussly, I want to retore saved directory
>(/my_dir) not into it's original place but into another test directory
>(/test/my_dir) ...
Restores are always relative to your current working directory. So all
you have to do is cd to /test/my_dir before doing the restore and all
the data should go in there.
I **never** restore directly into the same place the backup was done
from. There are too many odd things that can happen. I always bring
the files back in a parallel location, look at them to make sure things
are right, then mv them into place.
If you're doing a full restore, amrecover is probably not the best tool
to use. Restore programs typically have other parameters to tell them
they are doing a full restore (e.g. -r for restore) and they need to do
more work than usual so the result is exactly the way it was at the
time of the last backup. In particular, if you don't do anything
special you'll end up with files restored that had been deleted.
So for a full restore you probably want to run amrestore yourself and
pipe the output into your restore program. The docs/INSTALL file and
"the chapter" cover the details.
To help you find what tapes will be needed, I put together some notes
from a previous E-mail thread into a script:
ftp://gandalf.cc.purdue.edu/pub/amanda/amr-all
> Radu Filip
John R. Jackson, Technical Software Specialist, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
