Re: Advise on backing up files in Etch.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Wesley J. Landaker wrote:
> On Sunday 13 May 2007 18:35:38 Roberto C. Sánchez wrote:
>> To recap, you have something like this:
>>
>> - backup to external hard drive
>> - ~75 GB in /home
>> - can be stored unencrypted and uncompressed (I would recommend
>> compression only when your storage medium will no longer fit it
>> uncompressed)
>> - needs to be accessible right away
>>
>> In that case, I'd recommend rsync. It will easily work between two
>> local directories. You can mount your external hard drive at /backups
>> (or something like that) and then just periodically rsync your /home to
>> it. I used the "Easy Automated Snapshot-Style Backups with Linux and
>> Rsync" document as a starting point:
>
> I'd suggest considering rdiff-backup instead. It results in a plain
> unencrypted and uncompressed tree, exactly like rsync, but in addition,
> does real incremental backups. The increments themselves are binary diffs
> and are compressed. It's much nicer than plain rsync with snapshots.
I use both rdiff-backup and rsync. IMHO, you can't tell simly which is
better, since it depends on your requirements. ridff-backup is much
slower on big file systems (if your 75GB /home consist of many small
files as opposed to only video) that contain many files that change
(opposed to mp3s, jpegs or the like that are almost never changed or
moved around directories). If you move a jpeg or mp3 around, a lot of
time is wasted by rdiff-backup trying to further compress these files.
rdiff-backup gives you the possibility to restore the state of some file
or directory as to a state in the past, but you cannot 'browse' these.
I run rsync with a separate backup directory. So when my drive runs out
of space, I can just delete the largest/least important older backups.
rdiff-backup has the --remove-older-than option, which will do just
that. I accumulate quite a few dvbt streams, but I don't want (and can't
due to their size) to keep backups of those deleted for a long time, so
with rsync I find it simple to e.g. delete all 'old' videos, while
keeping all old backups of other files etc.
In short:
rsync is 'more simple', ie. it runs faster, but also more flexible by
the amount of command line options.
As your backup strategy evolves and becomes more complex, you'd just
evolve your backup script with rsync.
YMMV, .02
Johannes
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)
iD8DBQFGSFmqC1NzPRl9qEURAnXsAJ0b40U20MpjIUcGGxslc3lwnfM5IgCffs5W
xuhXTbeunWXt23ydM8rT2/U=
=NO31
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Reply to: