Re: Back up routines
On Sun, Jul 26, 2009 at 06:48:17PM +0100, 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.
>
> 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?
>
I've used BackupPC extensively, and I find it to be excellent. I've used
it at home and in a business, backing up both Linux and Windows machines.
At home I backup up my stuff locally, and back up my parents' and sister's
computers remotely over the internet (using rsync over ssh). My father
also has BackupPC running, and he backs up his stuff locally and mine
remotely. Why bother backing up locally if it's backed up remotely?
Because it's much quicker to restore from a local backup.
At work I was backing up in a similar fashion, one office in the US and one
in the UK. I had a real emergency once: 11 GB of data got accidentally
deleted from a file server. I had it restored in 15 minutes.
BackupPC isn't simple, but it's not terribly difficult. It just requires
reading some docs.
Advantages:
Backups are automatic -- no human intervention required once it's
configured.
Backups can be done remotely, over the internet.
Your data is controlled by *you*, not a 3rd party.
Files are pooled and compressed, so when backing up the same file multiple
times, the file is only stored once.
Disadvantages:
?
There probably are some, but I haven't experienced anything major in 2-3
years of using it.
-Rob
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