Red Hat Knowledgebase

Release Found: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Symptom:
Some operating systems allow me to copy my system disk to tape and allow me to restore that image after a system disk disaster. Is it possible with Red Hat to create a copy of my system disk to tape in such a way that I could restore it to a disk and then boot from that disk.

Solution:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux comes with utilities for preforming system back-ups.

The standard way of preforming backups is dump and restore, these commands are the standard way of backing up ext2 and ext3 filesystems.

Another backup utility in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution is Amanda. Amanda is an open source product that allows remote administrators the ability to preform dumps and restores.

There is also a snapshot utility that is used with virtual partitions and logical volumes. This, however, is mainly used for backing up large data-sets usually associated with data bases.

Information on these utilities and how to use them can be found in the manual pages for these commands by typing man dump or man restore at the command prompt.

Also, see the following web pages for more information:

• http://dump.sourceforge.net/
• http://www.amanda.org/