Gary Dale grabbed a keyboard and wrote:
>
> Bacula. It backs up whatever you want it to however you want it to.
>
> It's not as simple as some, but if you want a comprehensive backup
> solution, it's hard to beat. Bacula has some pretty good job definitions
> set up by default to do, for example, a weekly full backup and nightly
> incrementals with backups going back as far as you want.
>
> I use it to back up home directories and some shared Windows files kept
> on another machine. Bacula works well in mixed environments.
Sounds promising! I'll look into it.
I've been a *NIX junkie since before Linux existed; config files don't
scare me easily. :-)
> On the other hand, to do a full system backup to a second drive, try dd.
> Something as simple as a cron job to do
> dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=1M
> will do the copy quickly and effectively.
I'm sure it does, but I'm not looking to just copy over the entire
system to another drive every day.
> However, you may also want to consider software raid (mdadm). Use your
> two drives in a RAID 1 array so that a single drive failure won't shut
> you down. Use this in conjunction with bacula to avoid the "why did I rm
> that" problem and you should be unstoppable.
Agreed. Unfortunately I've been out of work for a while now, so
purchasing *two* drives is kinda out of the question. At least for now.
So if I do scratch up enough money to get another 1T hard drive, I'll
use it for backups. But soon as I'm working again, a RAID mirror is
definitely something I'd want to set up, for just the reason you mention.
> RAID 1 also leads to faster reads.
Really? I thought that the stripped array would get you faster access
than simple mirroring. Guess I learned something new. :-)
--Dave
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