Re: Backup

[Johannes Wiedersich <debian@aktendiener.de>]

On 17/08/12 10:40, 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.

FWIW, I gave up backing up to DVD when my data reached about 1/10 of the
size of yours. Too slow, too cumbersome (having to change disks), too
unreliable, to expensive etc.

I suggest to buy one or better two other 1TB usb disks and backup to
them (alternately). You don't need to be a shell programmer, a simple
$ rsync -av /path/to/disk /path/to/backup
followed by
$ cp -al /path/to/backup /path/to/backup-nnnn
where nnnn could be a number or a date, should be more efficient (and
cheaper in the long run) than a pile of optical disks.

Occasionally, you could use rsync's -c option to verify that your backup
is ok.

(/path/to/disk is the mount point of your existing disk; /path/to/backup
is mountpoint and path of your backup disk)

My 2ct,

Johannes