Board Business Chip Close Up 270572 Cropped

Learn five helpful backup and restore tips for Linux from someone who's been there, failed, and then succeeded.

It's easy to quote best practices and to tell someone what they should do, but it doesn't always work in actual practice. "Everything works on paper," was my response to an architect who told me that I need to "adhere to the recommended guidelines and best practices rather than being a rogue sysadmin." The fact is that I wasn't aroguesysadmin. The problem was that this "architect"had never even been inside a data center, norhad he ever seen a server enclosure. He was simply reading a manual and telling me how it should be done, although he'd never had the experience of doing it himself.

My experiences (and attitude) aside, you should follow, as closely as possible, the guidelines and the best practices for your systems. But, also follow your own best judgment in whatever you do as long as you have your users' and your system's best interests at heart. Here are my five Linux backup and restore tips from the trenches, in no particular order.

The link for this article located at RedHat is no longer available.