“Backups? I Don’t Need No Stinking Backups!”
If you don’t regularly make backups of your computer’s contents, you face a security vulnerability, plain and simple. You may lose some or all of your valuable information if your computer is compromised. You should back up your data as frequently as possible.You can use one of many techniques and software for making backups, but that’s stuff we couldn’t possibly begin to cover in this book. We wouldn’t be able to cover Red Hat Linux if we even began to go into detail.TipSo keep it simple: Archiving your home directory and copying it to another location is a simple and effective backup mechanism.For example, the following commands use the ubiquitous Linux tape archive (tar) command to create an archive of your home directory. You can then use the OpenSSH scp command to securely copy the archive to another location, such as your ISP account or another computer you have access to. Follow these steps to create an archive of your home directory:Log in to your user account.
Run this tar command:
tar czf mybackup.tgz .
In this case, the c option means to use tar to copy the specified files and directories. The z option tells tar to compress the data. The f option defines the text that follows it — mybackup.tgz — as the file to copy the files to. The single dot (.) says to copy to the archive all files in the current working directory.
Use OpenSSH to copy the tar archive to another location:
scp mybackup.tgz myloginaccount@myisp.com
This command securely copies the tar archive to the account myloginaccount at the ISP myisp.com.