state.
The GNOME File Roller
The GNOME desktop file archiving graphical application File Roller (file-roller) views, extracts, and creates archive files using tar, gzip, bzip, compress, zip, rar, lha, and several other compression formats. Note that File Roller is only a front end to the command-line utilities that actually provide these compression formats; if they are not installed, File Roller cannot use that format.
File Roller does not complain if you select a compression format that is not supported by installed software until after you attempt to create the archive. Install any needed compression utilities first.
File Roller is well integrated with the GNOME desktop environment to provide convenient drag-and-drop functionality with the Nautilus file manager. To create a new archive, select Archive, New to open the New Archive dialog box and navigate to the directory where you want the archive to be kept. Type your archive's name in the Selection: /root text box at the bottom of the New Archive dialog box. Use the Archive type drop-down menu to select a compression method. Now, drag the files that you want to be included from Nautilus into the empty space of the File Roller window, and the animated icons will show that files are being included in the new archive. When you are finished, a list of files will be shown in the previously blank File Roller window (see Figure 13.1). To save the archive, simply select Archive, Close. Opening an archive is as easy as using the Archive, Open dialog to select the appropriate archive file.
FIGURE 13.1 Drag and drop files to build an archive with the GNOME File Roller.
The KDE Archiving Tools (KDE ark and kdat)
Fedora provides you with the KDE ark and kdat GUI tools for backups; they are installed only if you select the KDE desktop during installation. Archiving has traditionally been a function of the system administrator and has not been seen as a task for the individual user, so no elaborate GUI was believed necessary. Backing up has also been seen as a script-driven, automated task in which a GUI is not as useful.
You launch ark from the command line. It is integrated with the KDE desktop (as File Roller is with GNOME), so it might be a better choice if you use KDE. This application provides a graphical interface to viewing, creating, adding to, and extracting from archived files as shown in Figure 13.2. Several configuration options are available with ark to ensure its compatibility with MS Windows. You can drag and drop from the KDE desktop or Konqueror file browser to add or extract files, or you can use the ark menus.
FIGURE 13.2 Here, the contents of a .zip file containing some JPEGs are displayed.
As long as the associated command-line programs are installed, ark can work with tar, gzip, bzip2, zip, and lha files (the latter four being compression methods used to save space by compaction of the archived files).
Existing archives are opened after the application itself has launched. You can add files and directories to the archive or delete them from the archive, as shown in Figure 13.3. After opening the archive, you can extract all its contents or individual files. You can also perform searches, using patterns (all *.jpg files, for example) to select files.
FIGURE 13.3 The opening view of ark presented as a simple GUI browser. Here, several files are being selected to add to the new archive.
Choosing New from the File menu creates new archives. You then type the name of the archive, providing the appropriate extension (.tar, .gz, and so on), and then proceed to add files and directories as you desire.
Using the Amanda Backup Application
Provided with Fedora, Amanda is a powerful network backup application created by the University of Maryland at College Park. Amanda is a robust backup and restore application best suited to unattended backups with an autoloading tape drive of adequate capacity. It benefits from good user support and documentation.
Amanda's features include compression and encryption. It is intended for use with high-capacity tape drives, optical, CD-R, and CD-RW devices.
Amanda uses GNU tar and dump; it is intended for unattended, automated tape backups, and is not well suited for interactive or ad hoc backups. The support for tape devices in Amanda is robust, and file restoration is relatively simple. Although Amanda does not support older Macintosh clients, it uses Samba to back up Microsoft Windows clients, as well as any Unix client that can use GNU tools (which includes Mac OS X). Because Amanda runs on top of standard GNU tools, you can restore files using those tools on a recovery disk even if the Amanda server is not available. File compression can be done on either the client or server, thus lightening the computational load on less powerful machines that need backing up.
Amanda does not support dump images larger than a single tape and requires a new tape for each run. If you forget to change a tape, Amanda continues to attempt backups until you insert a new tape, but those backups will not capture the data as you intended them to. Do not use too small a tape or forget to change a tape, or you will not be happy with the results.
There is no GUI interface for Amanda. Configuration is done in the time-honored Unix tradition of editing text configuration files located in /etc/amanda. The default installation in Fedora includes a sample cron file because it is expected that you will be using cron to run Amanda regularly. The client utilities are installed with the package am-utils; the Amanda server must be obtained from the Amanda website. As far as backup schemes are concerned, Amanda calculates an optimal scheme on the fly and schedules it accordingly. It can be forced to adhere to a traditional scheme, but other tools are possibly better suited for that job.
The man page for Amanda (the client is amdump) is well written and useful, explaining the configuration of Amanda as well as detailing the programs that actually make up Amanda. The configuration files found in /etc/amanda are well commented; they provide a number of examples to assist you in configuration.
The program's home page is http://www.amanda.org/. There, you will find information on subscribing to the mail list, as well as links to Amanda-related projects and a FAQ.
Alternative Backup Software
The free download version of Fedora does not provide any other sophisticated backup applications, but Red
