information about subscribing to the mail list and links to Amanda-related
projects and a FAQ.
Alternative Backup Software
Commercial and other freeware backup products do exist; BRU and Veritas
are good examples of effective commercial backup products. Here are some
useful free software backup tools that are not installed with Ubuntu:
flexbackup—This backup tool is a large file of Perl scripts that makes
dump and restore easier to use. flexbackup’s command syntax
can be found by using the command with the -help argument. It also
can use afio, cpio, and tar to create and restore archives locally or
over a network using rsh or ssh if security is a concern. Its home page
is www.edwinh.org/flexbackup/. Note that it has not received any
updates or changes in a very long time.
afio—This tool creates cpio formatted archives but handles input data
corruption better than cpio (which does not handle data input
corruption very well at all). It supports multivolume archives during
interactive operation and can make compressed archives. If you feel the
need to use cpio, you might want to check out afio.Many other alternative backup tools exist, but covering all of them is beyond
the scope of this book.
Copying Files
Often, when you have only a few files that you need to protect from loss or
corruption, it might make sense to simply copy the individual files to another
storage medium rather than create an archive of them. You can use the tar,
cp, rsync, and even cpio commands to do this; you can also use a handy
file management tool known as mc. tar is the traditional choice because
older versions of cp did not handle symbolic links and permissions well at
times, causing those attributes (characteristics of the file) to be lost; tar
handled those file attributes in a better manner. cp has been improved to fix
those problems, but tar is still more widely used. rsync is an excellent
choice for mirroring sets of files, especially when done over a network.
To illustrate how to use file copying as a backup technique, the examples here
show how to copy (not archive) a directory tree. This tree includes symbolic
links and files that have special file permissions you need to keep intact.