Summary

I hope that you never experience a major hard drive crash, but if you ever do, the effort of making backups will repay itself many times over. A variety of low-cost backup hardware is available to use with your Fedora system. The traditional tape drive is an excellent choice for backing up large amounts of data. If long-term archiving of data is needed, a writable DVD or CD drive is a good choice. If minimizing downtime is your main concern, mirroring data to a second hard drive is another smart choice. As for the tools you choose to do your backups, the dump and restore commands are old favorites, dating back to the early UNIX days (although they are considered somewhat unreliable these days). The Amanda backup facility is excellent for network backups. If you are dealing with backups in several different formats, the pax command might be helpful.