Restore

How to Backup Debian with Backupninja - home user

What good would making backups be if you never tested the restore function or didn't even know where it was? Kind of like making a boot/rescue floppy and never booting with it till the system won't start on it's own any more! Do you remember how that story ended?

Unfortunately for us there is no nice graphical or semi-graphical helper that I could find at this time in Sarge to do this. There are a few being developed but they are in alpha stage at this time, not what you want to trust data to.

So it is left to the independant tools used and mostly command line stuff ie. read the man page. This is the reason I used 'rdiff-backup' and 'makecd' methods since they can partly use standard copy commands and your favourite filemanager.

makecd
Test the cd/dvd after burning, use the check data function of the burner software during burning. Place it in another drive and mount it. Copy random files to a temp folder and see if everything is ok. Optical disks have a limited lifespan, have you checked any disks you made 6+ years ago lately?

rdiff-backup
The beauty of rdiff-backup is that it creates a mirror and diffs. For the mirror normal tools can be used to copy the data to a test directory. Try using fish in konqueror over the network to copy a file out of /backup on the host machine to a local temp folder. Enter this at the location bar : "fish://root@hostIP" or "fish://user@rhostname" you need the remote password for that user and ssh access through any firewalls. If you know of any other programs that use fish insert here.

rdiff-backup can also be called upon to do time based rollback, see the man page and be carefull, test in a temp folder and don't overwrite anything it will happily whipe out whole directory tree's if you use --force, remember linux is a unix it thinks you know what you want to do.