From the book Linux Administration Made Easy:
When deciding on a backup solution, you will need to consider the following factors:
Portability − Is backup portability (ie. the ability to backup on one Linux distribution or implementation of Unix and restore to another; for example from Solaris to Red Hat Linux) important to you? If so, you'll probably want to choose one of the command−line tools (eg.
dd
,dump
,cpio
, ortar
), because you can be reasonably sure that such tools will be available on any *nix system.What does "backup on one Linux distribution or implementation of Unix and restore to another" mean? Is it to backup a Linux system and then restore it later? Then what does it mean by "restore to another"?
Remote backups − Is the ability to start backups and restores from a remote machine important to you? If so, you'll probably want to choose one of the command−line tools or text−based utilities instead of the GUI−based utilities (unless you have a reasonably fast network connection and the ability to run remote X sessions).
Network backups − Is performing backups and restores to and from networked hosts important to you? If so, you'll probably want to use one of several of the command−line utilities (such as
tar
) which support network access to backup devices, or a specialized utility such asAmanda
or one of several commercial utilities.It seems that remote backup and network backup are the same. What are their differences?