The Linux operating system provides many different options for ongoing management. In this video, you’ll learn about some of these tools for backups, image recovery, disk maintenance, and more.
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If you need to backup and restore files on a Linux distribution, you may have some tools that are already built into the system. Check the documentation for your distribution to see what options may be available for you. There’s probably a graphical utility like this one in Ubuntu that’s configured to provide backups and restores all from this graphical front-end, and it also allows you to schedule exactly when those will occur.
There are many different command-line options inside of Linux. For example, rsync is a very common utility that you use to synchronize files between devices. This is one of the advantages you have with Linux is that there are so many different options available. So you should be able to find the one that works perfectly for your specific needs.
If you’re familiar with Windows system administration, then you know there are many options available for imaging a Windows drive and restoring that imaging later on. Although there aren’t quite as many options available for Linux, there are still some very good imaging options that you can use. One option available in many Linux distributions is dd.
This utility is designed to convert and copy a file, and in the Linux operating system, everything looks like a file. So you’re able to easily backup and restore entire partitions using the dd utility all from the command line. There are also a number of third-party utilities that are very commonly used for imaging in Linux. For example, GNU Parted and Clonezilla are two very good examples that are commonly used for imaging tasks.
A lot of the maintenance of Linux is built into the operating system so the system administrator does not need to constantly check in on the operating system. However, it is important that you have enough disk space for your operating system to be able to work properly. One of the things that can fill up disk space very quickly are the logs in the system, so you may want to check in and clear those logs out. They’re commonly kept in the slash var slash log directory. If you check that directory, you may be surprised at just how many different logs there are and how much information they’re storing on your system.
Another type of disk maintenance would be to perform a file system check. This is something that’s automatically done after a certain number of reboots, but sometimes you want to force that file system check. And you can do that from the command line by typing sudo touch /forcefsck for your file system consistency check. And the next time your system reboots, it will perform that file system check.
Another useful and very important tool for the Linux administrator is the terminal. This gives you access to the command line of the operating system where you’re able to control almost every aspect of the OS. If you need to check the performance of the operating system, modify any files, or run scripts, you would do them all from this terminal command line view.
If you need to see more than the command line that’s on a remote device, then you’ll probably want to use some type of screen sharing utility. And in Linux, you have many options available for screen sharing. Many of them are even built into the distribution that you’re using. For example, if you’re running Ubuntu there’s a Remmina remote desktop client, and there are others such as UltraVNC that you can install and use across any Linux distribution.