Chapter35.Backups, Troubleshooting, and Rescue

Chapter 35. Backups, Troubleshooting, and Rescue

What You'll Learn in This Chapter:

• How to back up your data, either on magnetic tape or removable media

• How to automate backups using shell scripts and the cron service

• How to restore data that you have previously backed up

• How to recognize signs of trouble and what to do about it

• How to use the Fedora Core 4 rescue system

In this last chapter, you learn how to deal with some of the tedious chores of computing life: making backups of your valuable data, restoring from these backups, and knowing just when to do either. Although discussions of backing up or restoring data and performing rescue operations often get lost in the shuffle of more immediately useful topics, you should pay as muchor perhaps moreattention to this chapter as you have to all the rest. This book is 35 chapters long, and working through it may seem to take days or even weeksbut it can take much longer than that to re-create months' or years' worth of data that was lost because you didn't maintain regular backups.