9.2.5. Tools from your distribution
Most Linux distributions offer their own tools for making your
life easy. A short overview:
-
SuSE: YaST now includes
expanded backup and restore modules.
-
RedHat: the File Roller tool
provides visual management of (compressed) archives. They seem to
be in favour of the X-CD-Roast tool for moving backups to an
external device.
-
Mandrake: X-CD-Roast.
-
Most distributions come with the BSD dump
and restore utilities for making backups of
ext2 and ext3 file systems. This tool can write
to a variety of devices and literally dumps the file(s) or file
system bit per bit onto the specified device. Like dd, this allows for backing up special file types
such as the ones in /dev.