Because of the openness of the Linux operating system,
there are often many ways to accomplish the same task.
But in this video I'll take you through some
of the more common tools that you'll find in Linux.
The Linux distribution that you're using probably
has a backup utility as part of the Linux distribution.
It's such an important part of ongoing maintenance
that it makes sense to be included with any Linux
distribution.
You may want to check with the documentation
for your distribution to find out
which specific backup application is being used.
This might be a graphical application,
like this one, where I can choose
to backup or restore directly from the user interface.
You'll notice there's even scheduling built into this one.
Or you may be able to run this from the command line.
Often a Linux distribution will include tar or rsync
as backup options.
This is one of the beauties of Linux,
of course, is that you can really
use many different methods to be able to accomplish a task.
You just need to find the one that's right for you
so that you can backup and restore all of your files.
The Linux operating system may not
have as many options for imaging a drive as other operating
systems might, but the ones that are available are very useful
and could be used in almost any Linux environment.
A good option that comes with many distributions of Linux
is dd.
This stands for data description.
It comes from an old name from one of the IBM job description
language utilities that's used to convert files.
But in Linux, we can use this not only to convert and copy
files, we can do this across the entire drive
and create an image very easily.
There are also some very good 3rd-party utilities
for imaging.
I've used both GNU Parted and Clonezilla
to be able to image all of my Linux devices
onto a single file and then be able to restore that image back
to that system.
As you're probably aware, the file systems in Linux
don't require a lot of ongoing disk maintenance.
So there aren't a number of utilities
that you must run every so often.
One bit of disk maintenance that you may want to do occasionally
is clean up the log space that's in use.
You'll find most of the logs being stored in Linux
under slash var slash log.
You might also want to manually force a file system
check of the operating system.
You can do this by adding a file to the root of the file
system called force fsck.
That's forced file system check.
And you can create this file very easily
by running a sudo touch slash force fsck.
This command simply adds an empty file
to the root of your file system called force fsck.
And then when you reboot your system,
the operating system sees the file,
and it knows to perform a disk check.
The command line in Linux is a core piece
of the operating system.
There are some system administrators
that rarely, if ever use, the graphical side of the operating
system and prefer to do everything
from the command line.
From here you can run scripts, manage files,
configure the operating system, set configuration settings,
and do practically everything necessary to keep your Linux
device running.
Just as Windows and Mac OS have screen sharing capabilities,
you also have the same features within Linux.
The screen sharing is something that
allows you to see the graphical display that
might be on another Linux device or another device that's
compatible with these protocols.
There are many different options just
like anything else in Linux.
And your distribution might include UltraVNC, Remmina,
FreeRDP, or one of the many other screen sharing
applications.
If you're managing a Linux system,
there will probably be times when
you need to administratively stop
an application from executing.
And there are a number of different commands
we can use to do that.
When running these commands, you will probably
need to run with elevated permissions.
And the way you do that in Linux is
to include the sudo command in front of the commands
you're running.
Sudo stands for superuser do, and it
means that you're going to run this command
as a different user, in most cases, as the superuser.
One command you can run is the killall command.
This will kill everything that has a certain name associated
with it.
For instance, if you wanted to stop every execution of Firefox
on a particular device, you can use the sudo killall firefox
command.
If you want to do this in a graphical display,
you can use the xkill command, instead of doing everything
at the command line.
But if there is an individual process ID
that you would like to stop, you can simply
use the kill command with the process ID
and stop that single process from executing.