Backups

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All lab computers must be backed up regularly. There are DOE mandates and LANL rules about this. Besides, it may cost you a week of time to rebuild a machine that went down without a good backup in place. In particular, you should have a clone of your system disk so you don't have to re-install your OS, packages and patches.

Here are some methods for different systems:

Linux:

1. Back up onto an external drive:
   1. Buy an external disk drive that plugs into your USB port: IBM sells a Portable 40 GB USB 2.0 Hard Drive, model 09N4255, IBM Web Price $299.00*, Availability: Within 2 weeks, web page under External Hard Drive at: http://www.pc.ibm.com/us/accessories/storage.html This device works under both linux and windows. (Was current August 2004)
   2. Get a copy of Norton Ghost (NG) from ESD
   3. Make a floppy (or CD?) that contains NG
   4. Using the NG floppy (or CD?), you can copy a partition or a whole drive onto the external drive
   5. Keep the external drive in a safe place

2. Back up the system drive onto your second disk
   1. If you have more than one physical disk in your machine: For example, command df

      Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
      /dev/hdb1              6190664   4183256   1692940  72% /
      /dev/hda1               101089     25151     70719  27% /boot
      /dev/hdb2             70753784   4971816  62187828   8% /usr1
      /dev/hda5             74778560   2725336  68254660   4% /local
      none                    255732         0    255732   0% /dev/shm
      /dev/hda2              1035692    157680    825400  17% /var
      

      All hda's are partitions on one disk, and hdb's are a second disk. Root (/) sits on hdb1 and all of hdb (~9 Gb) fits onto the free space on hda5.
   2. Do the backup, as a compressed tar file. Log in as root, go to /, and
      tar -zcvf /local/backup/root_backup_10aug04.tar *
      repeat for /usr1.

3. Back up your drives automatically onto LANL's mass storage system.
   The system is called TSM, and you can find it via ESD, which directs you to the TSM home page. Cost is $65 +$12/month +$3/Gb/month. For 10 Gb, this exceeds the price of option 1 in about half a year, but it is reliable.

Windows:

1. Back up onto an external drive: same as for Unix above
   Note that the drive mentioned above is a box that contains a standard notebook hard drive. This means if your laptop system disk dies, you can take the drive out of the box, and swap it for your laptop's drive, and you're up again.
3. Back up your drives automatically onto LANL's mass storage system.
   The system is called TSM, and you can find it via ESD, which directs you to the TSM home page. Cost is $65 +$12/month +$3/Gb/month. For 10 Gb, this exceeds the price of option 1 in about half a year, but it is reliable.

Macintosh: