Want to write script to back-up up Linux hdb drive to hdc drice

[rfw]

Hello againThe networking forum helped me solve my "I can't to connect to the ethernet problem".
Now, I want to back-up my hdb drive to my hdc drive. Hdb is 120 GB IDE, HDC is 160 SATA, I need to buy or write my own shell script to do the work.
I found an article "Easy Automated Sanp-shot Backups with Rsync" by Rob Flickenger. But it is so long I get confused.
Do I need to format the SAT drive? I rember from my Lucent SA days using volcopy. But, I guess things have changed. I have a CMS tool and drive to back-up my Windows drive. The tool did a full back-up once and has been doing incremental back-ups daily since then.
Iguess that is what I want. But being new/green, I will take your advice.:p

[John A]

Do I need to format the SATA drive?

First thing you need to do when preparing a new hard drive is to partition it. I prefer cfdisk, which is slightly more user-friendly than regular fdisk. So, on the command line, you would do something like: cfdisk /dev/sda where /dev/sda is your SATA hard drive.

You'll then probably see free space, in which you have to make a partition. Use Tab or right- and left-arrow keys to navigate through the menu. Create a new partition of type "Linux" (type 84 I think...).

Once you've created a partition, you're ready to format it. First you need to choose a filesystem type (in this example I use ext3), and then you need to format the partition with the type you've chosen: mke2fs -j /dev/sda1 Note that if you don't use -j, it will be non-journaled, otherwise known as ext2.

You can then mount the newly-formatted and partition drive by doing: mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/somedirectory optionally using -t to specify filesystem type if it's nonstandard.

You can then copy files. I won't go into that here, but if you need more help, just say so.

Hope this helped

[rfw]

Joe,

I will do what you say. The whole of my SATA will be my partition.
when I get that done, I want to copy all of my IDE drive to the SATA drive. Then I want to set-up incremantal back-ups. I guess I can use cron and rsync as Rob Flickenger suggests in is artical tiiled. "Easy Automated Sanpshot-Style Bacckups with Linux and Rsync" which I found through a Google search. :p

First thing you need to do when preparing a new hard drive is to partition it. I prefer cfdisk, which is slightly more user-friendly than regular fdisk. So, on the command line, you would do something like: cfdisk /dev/sda where /dev/sda is your SATA hard drive.

You'll then probably see free space, in which you have to make a partition. Use Tab or right- and left-arrow keys to navigate through the menu. Create a new partition of type "Linux" (type 84 I think...).

Once you've created a partition, you're ready to format it. First you need to choose a filesystem type (in this example I use ext3), and then you need to format the partition with the type you've chosen: mke2fs -j /dev/sda1 Note that if you don't use -j, it will be non-journaled, otherwise known as ext2.

You can then mount the newly-formatted and partition drive by doing: mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/somedirectory optionally using -t to specify filesystem type if it's nonstandard.

You can then copy files. I won't go into that here, but if you need more help, just say so.

Hope this helped

[John A]

I can't find cfdisk. I did find out that Red Hat removed it from Linux. Do you know where I can get cfdisk?

I haven't been able to find reports anywhere of cfdisk being "removed" from the Red Hat distribution. My suspicion is that it's still on your hard drive, hiding.

First of all, make sure you're root. The default paths for root are different than for a regular user. Next, try running it from different directories, such as /usr/sbin/cfdisk /dev/sda . Still can't find it? Run a search through the entire drive: find / -name cfdisk (you may want to pipe it if the results are too long) find / -name cfdisk | more Now if this search turns up with nothing, then you'll have to install it. Probably the easiest way to do it is to download the cfdisk rpm, and using either the command line RPM tool or the GUI RPM (to run the GUI RPM tool, just double-click the .rpm file), install the package. It will be installed in /usr/sbin/cfdisk, so use that path when running cfdisk after installation.

[rfw]

I installed cfdisk and now I am being told that libtinfo.so.5 is missing. When I downloaded my CD's to ginstallLinux, I got the i386 verizon of Ferdora 5. Could this explain the missing libtinfo.so.5.? I mean is it i386 versus i586 or should I proceed with i586 and keep going until all missing files are on my main disk?

[John A]

I installed cfdisk and now I am being told that libtinfo.so.5 is missing. When I downloaded my CD's to ginstallLinux, I got the i386 verizon of Ferdora 5.

OK, since you've got the i386 version, it's probably best to download the entire util-linux rpm package:
http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/freshmeat/rpms/util-linux/util-linux-2.9i-1.i386.html

If you still get the error message about libtinfo missing, then you'll need the ncurses rpm:
http://rpmfind.net//linux/RPM/fedora/6/i386/ncurses-5.5-24.20060715.i386.html

[rfw]

Joe,

[rfw]

Joe, I found files in /tmp. I can't figure out how to copy and paste them , so you can see them. I saw a file with name
cfdisk-2.11w-alt3.i588-1.rpm.

Are any of these /tmp file installation files? Can you tell me what to look for?
Maybe the file I need is sitting in/tmp. Is there anyway I can send you the ls -lt of /tmp?

[sn4rf3r]

man cp
man rpm
cp /tmp/cfdisk-2.11w-alt3.i588-1.rpm ~
rpm -i ~/cfdisk-2.11w-alt3.i588-1.rpm