On Sunday 16 May 2004 05:34, Syd Hancock wrote:
The problem at the top of my list is not how easy it may be to set up a system; it's what happens a year or two down the road when it's time to upgrade or the hard drive fails. Figuring out what has to be done to restore my personal files and applications on a new system is a right royal PITA whether on Windows or Linux.
I have a 2nd hand DAT drive, and am running the free version of Arkeia. It's only a DDS3 drive (quite small) so I run a two tape set, one for the home dirs and one for my music directory and /etc. I don't care about anything else as 99.9% of packages on my system came from the SuSE disks anyway. /etc is handy because I can refer to it for any configuration stuff I have forgotten and if I was doing a like for like restore then could pretty much copy it over the top.
This is an area where Linux shines, Windows is a complete nightmare to backup in regards to system settings, configuration data and even some user data. Sure you can use the System State thing in NT backup, but try restoring it to a machine that is not identical. I had a nightmare restoring a MS SBS 2000 Server the other week for this exact reason.
I don't know what I am going to do when I upgrade my machine soon, I am planning on having at least 160GB available and there is no way I can afford to have a tape drive capable of holding that. I may have to resort to the cheaper method of attaching an external drive, backing up to that and then keeping it off site somewhere.
As to upgrades, The machine I am typing this on has gone from SuSE7.2-SuSE7.3-SuSE8.0-SuSE9 I think the first time I upgraded I may have blown away everything but the home dirs, the other times I simply used the SuSE upgrade wizard. It has worked pretty well so far.
However the upgrade to 9.1 will be a fresh install as this machine is due for an upgrade and pretty much the only thing staying is the case.