On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 09:27:47PM +1000, Alexander Samad wrote: > On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 8:32 PM, Lisi <lisi.reisz@gmail.com> wrote: > > Please excuse the thread breaking. I have suddenly been being rejected by the > > list server and am sending for the third time. I hope that the list server > > is now happy with my SMTP settings. > > > > On Tuesday 15 June 2010 01:25:56 Andrew Sackville-West wrote: > >> There are many many ways to make take backups beyond having a disk big > >> enough to hold the data. > > > > Would you feel inclined to elaborate? I'm trying to solve this problem for my > > granddaughter's large HDD, and am not keen to have to buy a 300GB external > > drive. Tar would still require a fairly large medium. :-( see my other response to Ron Johnson. Basically, I was complaining, in a poorly worded way, that there is no such thing as too much data to backup. I think this is essentially what the OP was arguing. And just because the OP doesn't have an extra 1.3TB of hard disk lying around doesn't mean they can't take backups: stacks of DVD's, tape drives, online disk space etc.... Also, I did not mean to imply that you can fit all your data into less space than the data takes (barring compression... but that fits your data into the amount of space your data takes... so to speak). > > It all depends. Questions to ask > > How much total data is there to backup > How much data changes on each change > how many backups do I want to keep. > How easy do I want to make my restores > > > I use rdiff-backup remote diff backup package to a backup server, I > usually keep about 30 backups, figure if I haven't noticed in a month > then I probably don't really need it :) I have plenty of space on my > backup server (you could use a NAS box - one of those ones that takes > 2 disks so that you can raid1). > > I backup the system and the valuable data > > and for the really valuable data I send to 2 remote sites - its all > automated so I don't have to worry about it (sends me emails when it > has problems). took me a while to write/setup the system. This is fairly similar to what I do. I use rdiff-backup or rsnapshot to make hourly, daily, weekly or monthly backups of critical data with the time frequency varying depending on what the data is and how often it changes. This is all run via cron on the backup server. For certain really critical data (financial records in particular) I also tarball it up, encrypt it to myself and then send it to a server in another state that I have some spare space on. Again a cron job does it all automatically. Easy peasy once it's set up. > > I realise i will need a debian DVD to recover a machine, install base > and then just restore the system backup set and go from there. It's really a question of whether to backup the *machine* or the critical data. I think unless you need real high-availability, backing up a *machine* is really probably too much. At least for the general home user. In this day and age of really good installers, it's just easier to reinstall and then restore the data you need. For this purpose I keep backups of /home, and /etc and that's about it. I do keep backups of the MBR too, having once lost an MBR due to stupidity on my part... A
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