Backup recommendations

[Max Pyziur]

On Sun, 19 Nov 2006, Peter Gordon wrote:

> On Sun, 2006-11-19 at 12:26 -0500, Max Pyziur wrote:
>> In my case, I've ditched 90% of my LPs in favor of mp3s. [...]
>
> Just a side note here: Your best bet in this case is to store them all
> losslessly, such as in FLAC. The MP3 format, while also having patent
> and other legal concerns, earns its high compression ratio by discarding
> much of the extreme parts of the music data as well as using other
> algorithms to create a file that is much smaller and sounds the same,
> but is not. FLAC, however, is lossless: When uncompressed, it is the
> EXACT bit-for-bit PCM and other data of your audio file.
>
> However, for most people, high-bitrate lossy formats such as MP3 and Ogg
> Vorbis are "Good Enough(tm)" in that one cannot easily distinguish the
> difference between the encoded audio and the original track without
> probably-very-expensive audio hardware.
>
> For general backup purposes, I use rsync to copy my entire home
> directory, various configuration files in /etc, and other important data
> to a secondary and larger hard disk whose sole purpose is storage of
> this material. It suits my needs well enough. If you're more paranoid
> about data loss (such as for production systems in a workplace
> environment or similar) you may want to look into keeping multiple
> off-site copies of the data as well.

"Before the rain; before the rain ..."

Much thanks to all for the recommendations.  Looks as though rsync wins 
hands down, feet up.

Max
pyz at brama.com

> Hope that helps.
> --
> Peter Gordon (codergeek42)
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