Once the desktop is up, open up a console terminal. Switch to the parent directory of the directory you’d like to backup.

Now that you’ve changed over to the directory under the one you wish to backup, the command “tar cvzpf /some/path/some/file.tgz directory” where /some/path/some/file.tgz is the path and the filename you’d like to compress the directory to. “.tgz” is the common extension for a gzip compressed tarball file.

What this does is create a tarball with the options (c)reate, (v)erbose output, g(z)ip, (p)reserve, (f)ile output. To uncompress the tarballed backup directory, switch over to wherever you’d like it to decompress to and type “tar xvzpf /some/path/some/file.tgz”, the x standing for e(x)tract.

Of course, if you’re doing anything critical take some time to familiarize yourself with the TAR man page and play with the utility a bit. With a bit of fiddling, TAR makes for an excellent built in Unix backup tool!

Deep Freeze is a popular program for Windows and Apple computers and is now being released for Novell’s SuSE Linux distribution. What it does is clean the image of the distribution being used on logout, restoring the OS to it’s newly install-configured state.

While there are already fairly simple ways of doing this through Linux some business sectors prefer proprietary retail solutions to DIY solutions. If that’s for you, check out the report on it at desktoplinux.com.

Drive images are a copy of an entire drive, generally taken when it’s offline. Generally these are used for backups, forensic analysis, or in an attempt to save a drive with bare metal recovery methods.

A range of utilities are available, all with varying ease of use and functionality. One of these is G4L or Ghost for Linux.

G4L allows you to back up partitions or whole drives to a range of media or over a network. It’s Linux based and GPL licensed (although that has been a point of contention, hopefully they’ve worked it out) so it should be somewhat familiar to Linux users.

Check out their Freshmeat page, grab a copy, and burn it to ISO. Since the interface is a bit wonky I’d recommend using it on a few data sets you don’t care about, just to acclimate yourself.

This is especially useful when you’ve created an image of a partition to check for the presence of illegal or unauthorized content. Another use is to restore small files from otherwise corrupted disk images.

No matter how you need to use it, the how-to article Recovering Data with Foremost is available on PCBurn and you can get the program from the source.

So before you get to the point where you’re trying to do a bare metal recovery, why not back the data up? That’s where programs like the on we’ll be featuring next week, Mondo Rescue, come in.

Backups are incredibly important and frequently overlooked as a step of preventative system maintenance. Check out Mondo Rescue to make sure your covered in the case of a data recovery emergency.

It’s got you covered for most of the major Linux file systems and is reported (by the Mondo team) to be in use by “… by Lockheed-Martin, Nortel Networks, Siemens, HP, IBM, NASA’s JPL, the US Dept of Agriculture, dozens of smaller companies, and tens of thousands of users.”

So you know it comes highly recommended. And it’s GPL licensed along with being freely distributed! Check it out.

We’re very excited about this new forum for spreading the knowledge, and hope to offer up pointers to programs that’ll help you get systems back on track.  Daily news and weekly articles will start popping up this week, so stay tuned!