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Post by jamba on Feb 8, 2010 6:50:22 GMT -5
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Post by jamba on Feb 8, 2010 6:52:39 GMT -5
distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20100208#qa Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith) Backups
Better-safe-than-sorry asks: What do you recommend for backups? Methods, scripts, best practices?
DistroWatch answers: There are all sorts of different approaches for backing up data and what works best for you will differ a bit depending on your knowledge and the resources available to you. People who have 1.5 TB of music will want a different approach than the person who has 100 MB of pictures and text documents. Rather than dig into various methods (and there are a lot), I'm going to offer some general tips that I've found to be helpful. Please keep in mind, these are just tips for people at home; while some may also be helpful for businesses, that's a whole different topic.
Whatever method you use to backup your files, make sure it works. This probably sounds obvious, but I've run into situations where people thought they had daily backups of a server and it turned out there wasn't any useful data in the archives. So make sure you can restore data from your backups, otherwise your spare copy is just a paperweight. Pretend to lose a file every so often and see how much effort it takes to get your data back. Test your archives on a regular basis to make sure when an emergency strikes, there won't be any (extra) problems.
Always make more than one backup. Anything important enough to backup is important enough to backup twice. I've been through scary times where my backup has been corrupted and the second (or third) backup came through for me. It's also a good idea to store your backups in separate areas. One in your home for easy access and another which is kept at a different location, like a friend's house. The idea being that if one building burns down, your important files are somewhere else.
Following on the heels of #2, if you're keeping backups in different locations or sending data over a network, you may want to encrypt the files. The GNU Privacy Assistant (GPA) is an excellent tool for file encryption, as is GPG. For users who run a KDE desktop, KGpg and the Dolphin file browser make encryption and decryption point-and-click easy. Also, if your archives are password protected, make sure the password is something you will remember. You may have to use it six months, a year or even six years from now.
Keep it simple. I've seen some really complex, powerful scripts out there that ultimately just copied a file and placed it in a zip archive. Make sure whatever method you use to backup and restore data is as simple as possible. If your home machine's backup system uses a page-long script, pipes, half a dozen command line programs and three passwords (or keys), you're doing it wrong. A good backup solution is simple, portable and easy to debug.
One point to consider is how automated you want your backup process to be. For example, do you want to manually burn your important files to CDs on a regular basis, or do you want your files sent to a remote server via a cron job? And, going back to tip #1, if your process is automated, check up on it regularly to make sure it's really working. I once discovered an important server hadn't completed its backup procedure for three iterations because of a minor change to another machine on the network. That's not a good feeling.
When you start looking at the specific method you want to use, I recommend examining rsync if you're going to copy your data over a network. On the other hand, if you're copying data to a local USB drive, you might want to simply use something like find or tar to create your archive. For people who want to dive deeper into the hows and whys of backups, there's a good article which goes into more detail.
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Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it. (Linus Torvalds)
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Backups
Feb 9, 2010 22:26:19 GMT -5
Post by jamba on Feb 9, 2010 22:26:19 GMT -5
miek.nl/projects/rdup/doc.html rdup utility www.jimpryor.net/linux/dcron dcron I used a command similar to this, for my home directory backup: rdup /dev/null bin | rdup-tr -Otar | gzip -c -f > backup.tar.gz and then I just added a crontab entry to do this backup weekly. which may be a little excessive...monthly is probably fine. the only thing I really have to backup are my family's pictures!
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