linux

If your operating system (e.g. Windows) is damaged and it can not start up any more, what should you do? I think the most things are your documents, photos, etc. Usually you can format the hard disk and reinstall the operating system. But all of your files will be removed. If you have backups there is no problem, just restore them after reinstalling operating system. But what if you haven't any backup? In this article I will show you how to backup files even if your operating system cannot run. The solution is using Live Linux.

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".

"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?

The easiest way to back up your files is just copying. But if you have too many files to backup, copying and restoring may take too long time and it is not convenient. If there is a tool that can put many files into one file, the world will be better. Fortunately, 'tar' is used to create archive files. It can pack files or directories into a 'tar' file. It is like WinZip in Windows, but without compression.