Re: Backup

[Glenn English <ghe@slsware.com>]

On Aug 17, 2012, at 10:53 AM, Camaleón wrote:

> On Fri, 17 Aug 2012 03:40:41 -0500, 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).  
> 
> Optical media storage is a PITA for big amounts of data (it's very slow 
> and hard to manage when you intend to do rewrite operations).

I really hate to be the old fogey here, but if you've got the $$, tape 
sure does a good job. Use Amanda for both incrementals and fulls, and to 
reduce PITA, get cron to run them overnight. Or over the weekend, if you 
want to backup a lot of data, but infrequently.

Optical disks and hard disks don't last. I have audio tapes from the 1950s 
that are still good. Tape has its disadvantages, but longevity isn't one 
of them...

For backup, though, I'd suggest springing a little more media and telling 
Amanda to write uncompressed tarballs -- for reliability and ease of recovery 
from a major disaster. You can recover from an Amanda backup tape with nothing 
more than plain old tar. A major PITA, but it's possible.

-- 
Glenn English