[LAU] System Restore...

[Adam Sampson]

"Russell Hanaghan" <hanaghan at starband.net> writes:

> ...and at the risk of being stoned in the Linux public square, is there 
> *any* form of the System Restore function that follws the model of the 
> ~other~ OS?

I don't use Windows, so I have no idea how "System Restore" behaves,
but I find incremental backups very useful for fixing my machines when
I accidentally break something.

I use rdiff-backup, which maintains a copy of a directory tree
augmented with an arbitrarily-long history of changes. I run it
nightly on my root filesystem and home directory separately, so if I
mess up a file or directory I can just copy it out of the backup and
that'll be how it looked last night; if I want an older version (for
example, if I don't spot it's broken for a few days), I can use
rdiff-backup's restore mode to retrieve it as it looked at a specified
time in the past. If I want to revert the whole root filesystem I can
just rsync it back, or I can even boot directly off the backup if
necessary.

The downside is that you need the disk space to store the backup in --
but you keep a backup already, right?

-- 
Adam Sampson <ats at offog.org>                         <http://offog.org/>