Re: Backup

[Gary Dale <garydale@rogers.com>]

On 17/08/12 04:40 AM, Emil Payne wrote:
> I have a 1 TB external USB drive with 362 GB used. I'd like to do a 
> full backup to DVDs and then an incremental (or something) backup 
> every month or two, also to DVDs or CDs. I'd like the backups to be 
> compressed in order to save space (i.e. - the number of DVDs/CDs 
> used).  What is a good program to do this with?  Or, what is a good 
> step of different programs to do this with?  I'm a home user with 
> decent knowledge of Debian/Linux, but not a shell programmer.

Depending on your data, compression may or may not be useful. Video and 
audio data is usually already optimally compressed.

4.5G on a DVD is also not terribly useful if you want to back up large 
amounts of data. BluRay writers are cheap enough these days, and BD-RE 
discs are not too expensive. BD-R discs are even cheaper for doing an 
archival backup.

You don't say what you are backing up. If it is the data on the external 
drive, you may want to consider getting a second drive and backing up to 
that. It's a lot easier than manually swapping discs. In this case, you 
could try Bacula. It's not too difficult to set up and quite flexible.