Backup How-tos

Most of Windows users may know "Norton Ghost". Norton Ghost is a backup software for hard disks. It can backup a whole hard disk or a partition to an image file. Also, Norton Ghost can copy all the contents from a hard disk to another exactly. However, Norton Ghost is a Windows software, users on other operating system (such as Linux) can not enjoy its powerful function. Fortunately, most of Unix/Linux operating system provides a command line whose function is similar to Norton Ghost, it is called "dd".

Google Chrome is a new web browser developed by Google. Its interface is very clean and simple but it runs very fast. Google Chrome Backup is a small utility for backing up Chrome's profiles. A profile contains the bookmarks, history, passwords and your own settings. If you want to reinstall the operating system but you don't want to lose your Chrome information, you should backup the profile in advance.

If you are a serious blogger, you must know WordPress. WordPress is the most popular blogging tools all over the world. It is written in PHP and uses MySQL database to store the articles and the comments, etc. More and more people use WordPress to build their own blogs. If you don't like your hosting company and want to buy another one, first you need to backup all articles in your WordPress. In this article I will show you two ways to backup your articles in WordPress.

Windows registry maintains lots of information about your operating system. For example, it records the installed software, whether or not the CDROM can play automatically, etc. Many softwares add some information into the registry during their installation, or change some items. Sometimes it will cause some problems. For example, some softwares cannot run. Perhaps it is because the registry is damaged. Therefore, if you have backed up the Windows registry, you can try to restore it. Maybe it can solve the problems.

What should you do after installing Windows operating system? I guess the answer is to install a variety of drivers, especially for the old version of Windows. Video card, sound card, wireless network card, micro-camera... All need their own drivers so then can work. Obviously it is a very dirty work. If a software utility can backup the drivers when the system is well, and reinstall all the drivers after reinstalling the operating system, the world would become better.

"rsync" is a simple but powerful backup utility in Linux. Although the traditional archive tool "tar" can make a backup, "rsync" supports more functions, for example, saving the backup on a remote machine. For incremental backups, rsync provides a better method than "tar".

In the two previous articles I introduced two common used utilities in Linux operating system, tar and cron. "tar" is used for creating archive files and "cron" is a time-based scheduling utility. In this article, I will combine "tar" with "cron" to solve the problem: how to backup your files automatically?

If you are a serious webmaster and have your own server, you should take special care of your data. If you are a BSP (Blog Service Provider) or have a large forum, you need backup the database every day. But it is a boring work indeed. Why not to let the computer do the dirty work? Cron can help you.

MySQL is a free, open source database management system. It is used widely in the Internet. Some famous companies, such as Yahoo!, choose MySQL as their databases. Most of web hosting companies provide MySQL and there are many free scripts like WordPress, Joomla that use MySQL. As it is widely used in the Internet and the data is important, it is a very useful skill to master how to backup your MySQL database.

Windows Live Writer is a blog writing tool. It provides a powerful editing environment, like a simple MS Word. You can use it to write on your own computer and after finishing a post just click the publish button. The post will be published.