Re: Regarding tar and split
On Sat, Oct 13, 2007 at 02:59:32AM +0000, Sean Zimmermann wrote:
<snip...>
> I have one final question: some people have brought up the strength of
> programs like afio that compress files individually to protect against
> corruption. Most of the things I archive are large image or movie files
> (which typically don't compress well). I read through most of both
> tar's and afio's man pages, and afio seems to have some interesting
> features (like the ability to seek to blocks in an archive). If I
> am not compressing the archive, does afio and/or cpio still have
> benefits that make it more appealing than tar?
>
I have about 80 GB of various stuff on my computer. I have a second
computer for backups. I use 'cp -au --backup=t ...' to copy new
versions of files onto the backup computer early every morning, and
keep all prior versions of the changed files. No archive format, No
compression. I've written backup script that keeps track of file
deletions. Mostly I have used by backup to recover things that I have
damaged by user error. I've not yet ever had a hardware error that
lost my data. The directory tree on the backup machine grows slowly
as I work on things. Some day I'll have to work on a script to strip
out really old versions of some files. Or maybe I'll just buy a newer
bigger HD for the backup.
I also buy an external USB drive from Costco when they have a
expecially good price and copy a whole image onto it and put it away
for safe keeping.
I was following this thread to see if I was missing any good tricks. I
think I'll stick with what I'm doing already. IMO, what you need depends
on what you do with your computer, what kind of error that leads to,
and what kind of loss you would find really painful. I don't backup the
Debian software. Its better for me to just reinstall from a repository.
YMMV
--
Paul E Condon
pecondon@mesanetworks.net
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