On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 10:59:46AM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote: > On 06/15/2010 09:48 AM, Lisi wrote: > > > >Thanks for this. I was originally responding to Andrew's saying: > ><quote> > >There are many many ways to make take backups beyond having a disk big > >enough to hold the data. > ></quote> > > > >I can think of very few - and was interested in what he was thinking of. > >Incremental/differential backups are not really practical, since she will be > >at school. A periodic dd (or Clonezilla?) of the whole drive and more > >frequent updates of her personal data (of which I understand that there is > >not much) would be the optimum, but a trifle pricey, so I am still looking at > >alternative possibilities. > > > > I wrote a script that only backs up our data directories (including > much of /home) into a bunch of tarballs, excluding "junk" folders > like caches, thumbnails, trash, etc, and compressing most but not > stuff like image and OOo document directories. > > Each backup goes in a separate, dated directory. > > For huge binary directories (like uncompressible video and audio), I > simply do a "cp -vau" from the "live" tree to the backup tree. > > The bottom line, though, is that *yes*, you *do* need enough disk > space for the backup data. Yeah, my choice of words was unfortunate. What I really meant was something along the lines of: The inability to find a 1.3TB external disk it not a reason not to take backups. If the data needs backing up, then there are solutions besides one big honking disk to copy it onto. Tape drives, big stacks of DVD-R/RW's, arrays of smaller disks, leased disk space onlines somewhere, etc. I think the OP said something like: I have 1.3 TB and it's too big to backup. This of course is patently ridiculous. meh. To address Lisi's issue, I would suggest a cronjob that checks for network connectivity and then if it's got network, runs rsnapshot (or rdiff-backup) over passwordless ssh to a server somewhere. That would be fairly lightweight, once the initial copy is made. And it would be secure and easy in the longrun. If the user needs local backup, then a usb drive with rsnapshot would be reasonable. It creates duplicate filetrees at each snapshot, but uses hardlinks for unchanged files to keep the total size from ballooning out of control. I think it's pretty slick because it maintains some of the size control of differential backup but also makes access to the complete filetree at a given time a snap. very much my .02 A
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