Re: Back up routines
On 7/26/09 11:48 AM, AG wrote:
Generally I have relied on the separate partitioning of my /home
directory as some measure of protection against hosing my system through
pebkac-type activities, but this is not necessarily the most reliable of
options and certainly won't help in the case of a catastrophic HDD-failure.
It won't help with accidental deletions in /home, either.
Thus, can I please have a few recommendations for a backup routine that
is safe for dummies (i.e. me) and is low maintenance that I can just
leave to run according to a cron job once (or twice) a week? It would be
backing up to my former IDE HDD (now in an enclosure) via an USB. It
would be best if the application was able to tell what has changed
between backup sessions to back up only that which is new, but perhaps
that is the default anyway.
Any recommendations please?
There are 10M ways to backup. A lot of the decision process has to do
with cost.
I use amanda cron jobs every other day, and write to tape (expensive,
not real fast, but very reliable). But I hear amanda will do disk now. I
like amanda because it's been around long enough to get the bugs out,
it's free, and it writes with tar or dump -- plain old *nix utilities,
so things are recoverable by hand if worst comes to worst.
Backuppc and Backula (sp?) are also well respected. Rsync can do a good
job, too. Also all free.
You might want to consider whether or not you want to keep old versions
of things around, in case you change your mind about a mod. And if you
do want to keep them, how long? That can get more complicated, but it
can be well worth the trouble. And expense.
And if files have been deleted on the master, do you want the BU system
to delete from the backup as well?
And one more thing, be sure to verify what been copied. An unverified
backup isn't a backup. Usually costs nothing but time and wear on hardware.
--
Glenn English
ghe@slsware.com
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