Automated backup was an important aspect, because I want to do the backups during the time, when I'm at work. Since I can't change the CD-Rs at that time, and the backups don't fit on one CD, I've choosen a concept of a weekly backup. At one day, the backup is made (I call it Zip-day), the others are used for burning the CD-Rs. You can use this application in a lot of other ways, but it becomes a little curious, because you have to switch with Zip-day to decide, what it does. There are two kinds of what I call sessions:
The following steps are processed by the automated backup:
I use a timer to turn on and off my computer, when I'm at work.
The computer is booted from CD. The bootable CD I've created will
startup a Debian Linux distribution, which runs completly on ram disks. Like that,
you even can make a backup of a box with no linux installed on it. Only one
harddisk partition is mounted (be sure it is supported by the used kernel),
which is used to create the temporary backup
files before burning them on CD. The only purpose of this partition is
to have the backup configuration file and the backups on it.
At the end of the boot process a perl script is started, which reads
out the parameters of the backup configuration file, which is stored on
the mounted harddisk partition. Once a week the harddisks are read out
(backup session)
and the days after, each day a CD is burned with the backups, untill there
is nothing more left to burn (burn sessions). Those CDs are also bootable.
If there is
a directroy called 'boot' on the mounted harddisk partition (in the selected
subdirectory), this is taken for the bootstuff (you can ignore this;
it's only for developement purpose), otherwise the boot-directroy
of the CD is taken (so that your backup CDs boot in the same way as your
initial boot CD does).
See 'Installation and getting started' for how to make your own automated backup.
Installation and getting started Index Concept of manually backup