Introduction

I began gathering contributions for this book, it soon become obvious that there would be an entire chapter on backups. Not only do BSD users follow the mantra "backup, backup, backup," but every admin seems to have hacked his own solution to take advantage of the tools at hand and the environment that needs to be backed up.

If you're looking for tutorials on how to use dump and tar, you won't find them here. However, you will find nonobvious uses for their less well-known counterparts pax and cpio. I've also included a hack on backing up over ssh, to introduce the novice user to the art of combining tools over a secure network connection.

You'll also find scripts that fellow users have created to get the most out of their favorite backup utility. Finally, there are hacks that introduce some very useful open source third-party utilities.