rdiff-backup is my favorite tool for keeping backups on Linux systems. Today, I started using it on a Windows 7 desktop as well. At first, I used rdiff-backup from the cygwin project, but I soon noticed that, if I did anything else that required moderate hard disk access on the computer on which the cygwin [...]

I still haven’t figured out whether it happened because of pure stupidity, temporary brain malfunction or low caffeine concentration in the blood, but a week ago, by mistake, I wiped the MBR of my primary desktop’s hard disk and also (because, you know, the MBR alone is never enough!) the boot sector of the first [...]

delayed-shutdown is an initscript that delays the shutdown (runlevel 0) or reboot (runlevel 6) procedure as long as a pre-defined lock file exists. The goal is to create a mechanism, which can be used by programs that perform critical operations that must not be interrupted, in order to delay system shutdown until these programs have [...]

What I tried to accomplish today was to prevent a system shutdown or reboot or suspend, if a specific process was still running in the background. This might sound pretty useless, but having shut my PC down once again this afternoon while the backup process was still active in the background, I decided to resolve [...]

RPM and DEB packages are both containers for other files. An RPM is some sort of cpio archive. On the other hand, a DEB file is a pure ar archive. So, it should be possible to unpack their contents using standard archiving tools, regardless of your distribution’s package format. Under normal conditions, you should use [...]

In my opinion, the biggest problem of the tar format (‘ustar‘) is that it does not store the checksums of the files it contains. So, in order to be able to verify the contents of the tar archive, you either need to keep the original data on the hard drive and compare the archive contents [...]

A few days ago, I had decided to revise my data backup methods, so to be able to easily recover as much data as possible after a partial corruption of the medium, a DVD that is, on which the data has been stored. I should clarify that by corruption I by no means include the [...]

Until now I have been creating partition images with Partimage, which has never failed. Another very popular tool nowadays is CloneZilla. This software, which happens to include partimage among various other utilities, has wider filesystem support and a better set of features – taking/restoring backups across the network is supported. The fact that this is [...]

Generally, the only reason for which you may need to create a bootable Windows CD is when you have updated the operating system installation files with the latest Service Pack (slipstream). Even in this case, chances are that most users will rather use standard windows software to create the bootable CDs than mkisofs under Linux, [...]

I guess that every single *nix user, at least once, has run across files with the *.run or *.bin extensions. These scripts are usually software installers and are widely used to distribute, but not limited to, proprietary software to the Unix world. Examples are the popular NVidia or ATI display drivers for Linux and other [...]