Backup recommendations

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Sun Nov 19 20:01:44 UTC 2006


On Sun, 2006-11-19 at 11:26, Max Pyziur 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.
> 
> In my case, I've ditched 90% of my LPs in favor of mp3s.  I've also begun 
> scanning both foto prints and negatives of my family's going back to the 
> 30s finishing about 25% of this project.  A hard drive failure could wipe 
> all of this out. (no kidding ...)
> 
> I have a home network with a server (used as the DSL router, gateway) 
> where I have some spare disks to which I copy/ftp/smbclient stuff from the 
> various home machines.

If you want to make this fully automatic with a web interface to
browse old backups and do restores, look at backuppc
(http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/).  It might be overkill to back
up a single machine, although if the content is compressable or has
duplicate files, it's compression and linking scheme will pay off,
and you'll be prepared if you want to add other machines into the
system.

> I suspect that with the amount of digital content I'm accumulating, 
> though, that there are better/improved ways and would be interested in 
> reading others' recommendations and practices.  Or even recommended links.

Depending on how fast you might need to do a restore, there are some
advantages to just doing an rsync over ssh to a more-or-less identical
drive on another machine.  Then you can swap drives and be back up
in a few minutes.  The down side is that if you accidentally erase or
overwrite files you'll duplicate the error to your backup on the next
run, where backuppc will keep a history of a week's (or whatever you
want) of copies on line without using a lot more space.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com





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