[CentOS] Re: Backing up remote system

[Ugo Bellavance]

Scott Ehrlich wrote:
> I have an Overland Arcvault tape library, a CentOS 5 box, a Windows XP 
> system, and RAID box that supports NFS and CIFS.
> 
> The RAID box is remotely located and acts as central file storage.
> 
> I might normally use dump to perform backups, but as was learned here, 
> and on dump's man page, dump doesn't support remote file systems such as 
> NFS or CIFS.
> 
> So, for now, I've connected the library to a Windows XP system, running 
> Service Pack 2.  I have a shell script that tar gz's the directories of 
> choice to preserve, places them in /backup, and, via samba's config of 
> making /backup available, have it mounted as a drive letter on the XP 
> system.  I'm then using XP's built-in backup/restore program to store 
> the contents of /backup to tape, and that is working fine for now.
> 
> Is there a reliable Linux/CentOS-based way to do this, too?   I know 
> people keep saying use Amanda and/or bacula and be done with it, but in 
> the event something goes wrong and the mysql, etc database gets corrupt, 
> and people want their data back, it would be much easier to use a 
> readily-available command, like cpio, tar, etc, to do the job.

For mysql, I strongly using MySQL's mysqldump or a wrapper to backup the 
DB, then put it to tape.