Backup recommendations

[Tom Horsley]

On Sun, 19 Nov 2006 12:26:39 -0500 (EST)
Max Pyziur <pyz at brama.com> wrote:

> 
> With so much content (disk, data, text, photos, video) moving (if not 
> already moved) to the digital realm what recommendations does the Linux 
> desktop community have for storage/backup.

My backup scheme currently uses a 500 Gig usb2.0 drive and rsync
running in cron every night. Rsync is a bit of a pain to get setup
right with the gazillion options and the obscure quirks of behavior
(directory names mean one thing with trailing / and another without
it :-), but after enough experimentation and trial runs, you can get
it doing pretty much anything you want it to do.

One of the options I like is the --backup-dir option so I can have it
stash the files that changed since yesterday in a separate directory
when it is doing its daily backup. This way I have a complete archive
of everything in case I realize I need a backuop from 3 or 4 days ago.

If I get really ambitious, I can copy the older backup-dirs to DVDR when I
start to run out of space - If I'm not ambitious, I can just delete
the older dirs when I run out of space :-).

The Maxtor drive I bought came with NTFS already setup on the whole disk,
but a little work with fdisk and mkfs soon fixed that and converted it
to ext3.