4.1. Theme And Variations
4.1.1. No ZIP drive
This backup process used to requires you to have the ZIP disk drive present at each backup. It now creates the ZIP disk's contents in a directory, which you can back up over the net. Then you only need to build a ZIP disk (with cp -rp ) on the backup server when you need to restore.
The backup process will be faster than directly writing to the ZIP drive, but you should check that the resulting directory will fit on your ZIP disk (with the output of du -hs $target.zip in the script Knoppix )! See the definition of the variable zip in that script.
My laptop has problems running both a network card and a ZIP drive, so this is the process I use to back it up. I keep a backup image as well as the current one, so that I have a fallback in case the computer crashes during a backup.
Alternatively, you could build several ZIP disks' worth of backup on the hard drive, and feed them to the system on restore.
4.1.2. CD-ROM
This is similar to the no ZIP drive option above. Save your backups to a directory on your hard drive, as noted. Then use mkisofs to create an ISO 9660 image from that directory, and burn it. This does not work with some CD-ROM based Linuxes, like Knoppix , because the Linux has to have the CD-ROM drive. Unless you have two CD-ROM drives, say one in a USB clamshell. I have a DVD burner set up this way with exactly this in mind.
Or look at remastering Knoppix with your first and second stage backups on the CD-ROM/DVD. You should also be able to remaster finnix .
These days many computers come with a CD-ROM drive but no floppy diskette. And floppy drives do fail. So it's a good idea to burn your CD-ROM with a bootable image on it. The bad news is that the "El Torito" format supports 1.2 MB, 1.44 MB and 2.88 MB floppies, and tomsrtbt uses a 1.7 MB floppy. The good news is that you can get a 2.88 MB version, tomsrtbt-2.0.103.ElTorito.288.img , from the same mirrors where you get the floppy image. Place a copy tomsrtbt in the root directory of the backup files. Then use the mkisofs command line option -b to specify tomsrtbt-2.0.103.ElTorito.288.img as the boot image file.
The only down side of this process is that many older BIOSes do not support 2.88 MB floppy images on CD-ROMs. Most of those will boot to a tomsrtbt floppy.
An alternative is to use Syslinux . It is not dependent on a floppy diskette image, and you can build your own CD with a number of tools, such as tomsrtbt , on it.
You may have to adjust the BIOS options to allow the computer to boot to CD-ROM drive. If you can't do that, either because the BIOS won't support booting to CD-ROM, or because you can't get into the BIOS, see Smart Boot Manager (SBM) as described in the Resources .
Test your CDs on the drive you will use at restoration time. If you find you need to hack the scripts, you can copy them to /tmp , a RAM disk under tomsrtbt , and edit them there. The scripts will run there. As a RAM disk is volatile, be sure to save your changes before you reboot!
4.1.3. Multiple ZIP disks
By splitting up the two first stage scripts, Prev and Prev , you could spread the first stage metadata across multiple ZIP disks.
4.1.4. Excluding From First Stage Saving
There are time when you need to squeeze a few megabytes from the first stage data, especially when you are pushing the limit
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