Linux Unleashed, Third Edition:Lone Star Software’s Lone-Tar





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Installing Lone-Tar
The installation process for Lone-Tar is pretty simple. You need to log in as root and change to the /tmp directory. Once there, extract all the files from the CD-ROM or disk (if you have put the Lone-Tar software on the disk) with a tar command. For example, if you have copied the Lone-Tar files to a floppy in drive A:, you would log in to the system as root and issue the following two commands:


cd /tmp
tar xvf /dev/rfd0


The tar command tells Linux to extract all the files from the first floppy drive (/dev/rfd0) and store them in the current directory.

Tip:  Some Linux systems don’t address the first floppy as /dev/rfd0 but prefer /dev/fd0 instead. If you get a message about “Device unknown” when you use the command line shown above, use /dev/fd0 as the floppy device name instead.

If you are installing from CD-ROM, you can copy the files to the /tmp directory directly using cp. For example, if the files are stored on the CD-ROM in the directory /lone-tar, and the CD-ROM is mounted to your Linux system in the directory /cdrom, you would issue the commands:


cd /tmp
cp /cdrom/lone-tar/* .


The exact command line you use depends on the location of the Lone-Tar files on the CD-ROM and the mount location on your system.

Once the files are all safely in the /tmp directory, you can start the installation process by issuing the command:


./init.ltar


This program was written by Lone Star Software to install all the components of Lone-Tar properly. You are asked a bunch of questions about your tape or backup drive, its capacity, and whether you want to print the online manuals. If you don’t want to print the manuals during the installation process, you can print them at any time from the Lone-Tar menu.

To start the Lone-Tar system in menu-driven mode, issue the command


ltmenu


You should see a screen like the one shown in Figure 64.3. Pressing Enter takes you to the main menu shown in Figure 64.2. If you want to use your Lone-Tar system in command mode, use this command:


Figure 64.3.  If Lone-Tar was installed correctly, you should see this welcome screen when you start up the menu mode.


lone-tar


Follow it by any options or by itself to display the help screen shown in Figure 64.3.

Backing Up with Lone-Tar
Backups are a vital part of any Linux system, whether you use it for serious work or just for playing. The reason is simple: reloading your Linux system, reconfiguring it the way it was, and reloading all your applications can take a long time and sometimes lead to errors. Recovering from a backup tape or other backup device can take a few minutes, but requires little intervention on your part. If you have important information stored on your Linux system, then you really should have regular backups made for safety’s sake because it’s often impossible to reconstruct data you lost.


Tip:  If you are forced to use floppies for your backups, you should use the Floppy choice from the main Lone-Tar menu. This option leads to the Floppy menu, which lets you back up and restore using your floppy drives instead of a tape drive.

Lone-Tar lets you make two kinds of backups: masters and incrementals. The master backup is a complete backup of your system, with every file on the filesystems backed up safely. An incremental backup is made between masters and holds the changes to the system since the last master. Incremental mode lets you make backups much quicker because there is no need to back up every file. Linux knows which files have changed because of the attributes attached to each file, and the files that have been created or modified since the last master backup are written to the backup medium. In case of a problem and a reload, the master is reloaded first, and then the incrementals made since the master. If you’ve lost a file or two, you can often get them from the incremental itself.

The manner in which you create master and incremental backups depends on how much you use your system, how much data you change daily, and how important your system is to you. For example, a regularly used system could get a master backup once a week to a high-capacity drive. Incrementals could be performed automatically each night.
If you don’t use your system much, you can do master backups once a month and incrementals weekly, although this isn’t really recommended. For heavily loaded systems, you may want to forget about incrementals all together and make a new master backup every night. One of Lone-Tar’s strengths is the capability to automate backups, as you will see.



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