-----Original Message----- From: James Elsey Sent: 19 May 2008 10:22

Hi

Can anyone suggest a good backup procedure whereby I can backup all my photos/mp3s/videos etc under /home?

I could back them up to a separate drive, but I only have old hard disks (10gbs) and don't really trust them. I'd like to backup onto DVD but my /home is around 80gb

I have separate partitions for /home, pictures, documents, music, video and mail (.evolution) and mount them via fstab under my /home directory. I keep each one to 5Gb so I can back it up to DVD.

<rant mode="on"> Actually not true anymore because Gnome (in their infinite wisdom) decided that any volumes mounted under /home (in addition to /media) will appear on the desktop. After several fruitless attempts to hack the Gnome configs and libraries to stop this (looks like Nautilus is the real culprit here and I'm not about to start hacking that - yet ):-> ) and seriously considering moving to Kubuntu, I ended up mounting them under /mnt and symlinking them back to my home drive. I do like a nice tidy desktop! :o) </rant>

I then use the excellent SystemRescueCD to boot and create a compressed backup via PartImage of each partition (onto a gash dump partition I've set up) and then copy these to DVD.

SystemRescueCD has an excellent PDF manual in the root of the CD image that tells you how to customise it. With a little effort you could automate the whole thing (apart from sticking a new DVD in the drive when necessary). Me? well I still do the whole thing by steam ATM but one day I'll get round to automating it (and a penguin will fly!!).

Are there any good compression tools that can compress image files for backup?

Well depends on the image file type. Most of them are already compressed, but, as I said, PartImage offers a compression option.

I'm on ubuntu 8.04

Snap, me too! :o)

Thanks

James Elsey

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On Monday 19 May 2008 10:22:13 James Elsey wrote:

I could back them up to a separate drive, but I only have old hard disks (10gbs) and don't really trust them.

You could buy new ones. USB or something. They're not too expensive these days. Especially for 80GB.

I'd like to backup onto DVD but my /home is around 80gb

Is your concern that you'd need ~18 DVDs or that you don't know how best to split the files up? If it's the later, there's always dirsplit. It's in the genisoimage package. See $ dirsplit -h for details.

Otherwise, you may find that you have some success with rsync and a USB hard drive. But what do I know, my /home partition is only 6GB ;-)

Cheers, Richard