Re: Backup

[Gary Dale <garydale@rogers.com>]

On 17/08/12 10:07 AM, Emil Payne wrote:
> On 08/17/2012 04:20 AM, Gary Dale wrote:
> > 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.
> All the folders in my home folder (except "desktop") is a link to a 
> folder on the backup drive.  These are: Backups, Documents, Downloads, 
> Favorites, Memos, Music, MyPDA, Pictures, Programs, Projects, Public, 
> Temp, Templates, Themes, Utilities & Videos. Also, I have the entire 
> filesystem for this computer and for a separate Windows 7 computer 
> copied in tar.gz format. (I connect the drive directly to the Windows 
> box via the usb cable to do that.) There is also a separate "Backup" 
> folder on the backup drive where I have a couple of programs running 
> backups /home, /opt & /var and where I also back up cells phones for 
> friends and relatives (8 at the moment) and things like my camera and 
> Palm PDA SD cards.
>
> (Speaking of tar.gz; what is a good format for compression for this 
> varied type of info? I've access to about 20 different formats on this 
> box.)
>
> This is the type of stuff I want to make a safe backup of.  I've 
> already lost all the info on the drive once several months back when 
> someone defragged it when it was hooked up to the windows box. I have 
> a ton of old CDs collected from about 10 years of use that I was able 
> to (with a lot of pain and work) get quite a bit of data back from.
>
> The suggestion of a blue ray drive and disk or a secondary drive sound 
> like a good one.
>
> Any other suggestions for things I haven't thought of?

Whether or not optical is a PITA depends on how much data you have to 
back up. If it fits onto a single disc, it's great. Otherwise you may 
want to look at other options. BluRay can hold 24G - 45G depending on 
the number of layers.

I haven't seen BD-RE in double layer yet, so assume 24G for now. For me, 
that's more than sufficient to back up all my work in a year. BD-RE is 
good for a long time, depending on usage, and is simple to use.

I prefer lzma compression for tars. It's a bit slower than some, but 
gives really good compression.

Never rely on a single backup. I keep multiple archives of old work on 
optical discs, in addition to a live copy and a live backup copy on a 
separate file system on the same RAID5 array. That's actually not all 
that safe (the RAID array could fail), but the live backup copy is 
mainly used if I accidentally delete the wrong file.

I don't recommend backing up entire file systems very often. It's your 
data, not the programs, that are critical. You may also want to back up 
/etc since it contains your system settings and is highly compressible.