GSoC/GCI Archive
Google Code-in 2012 The NetBSD Project

Describe how to backup NetBSD

completed by: Puck Meerburg

mentors: blymn, Julian Coleman, Julian Fagir

Though NetBSD is much like other Unixes in this respect, backup is still something you should consider specially for every operating system.

Which tools are available in the base distribution for backupping, like dump(8) and restore(8)?
Which one suits better, pax(1), dump(8) or even just rsync or other special backup solutions? What are their use cases?
What is a full, a differential, an incremental backup? What is the estimated space usage of them, depending on the backups?
How would you restore your system after a crash, which steps have to be taken to get a working system again?


After reading the resulting article, the reader should be able to decide for a backup scheme and solution and implement it without further research.

Our preferred format for the submission is some form of plain text, as that is most portable and can be read anywhere.  If you want to use a word processor, please export the file as text.  You could also add something like markdown or latex to add structure (these are both plain text based), but that is not a requirement.