Message: 3 Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 12:03:32 -0700 (PDT) From: David Freeman david_freeman@rocketmail.com Reply-To: David_freeman@rocketmail.com To: alug@stu.uea.ac.uk Subject: [Alug] Backing up

All,

I am thinking it may be a good time to start thinking about backing up the data on my HDD. I am after a cheap method and I though about getting a CDRW drive now they are sub 」100. Is this a good idea? can I just use tar to put it all on a cdrw each week? What would people recommend? Will any CDRW drive work with Linux?

Thanks

D

This sounds good. It's very roughly what I do. My methods below might sound OTT but it has saved me in the past. Take what you like from it....

I run a nightly cronjob that backs up all the changes in the last 24hrs from my home folder (usually about 20mb). I also run a weekly cronjob that does the same (about 100mb). Those tar files are sent to a partition entirely separate from anything Linux. To my Macintosh partition actually. Then, when that 'backup' partition gets full, like it is doing now, I back up my entire home folder (1gb) and burn the lot onto a couple of CDs. I do this about once a month. Sure, I have multiple backups of a lot of stuff, but I like it that way, because if I make a stupid error somewhere down the line, I can usually just go back to the backup I made the day before the error and rescue those backed up files. It works as a kind of archive of backups. When I feel confident that a set of backups is no use to me any more, I proudly use the CD to put my coffee on.

This may well sound like unnecessary repetition, but it's all automated, so I don't do anything except burn a few CDs every month. My CD burner is firewire, so it won't work in Linux just yet, which is why I use a back up partition. I could buy some USB storage, but I'm willing to wait for decent firewire support in Linux. USB is so bloody slow. Like I said, the above very recently saved me from redoing four months of work....

cheers joss p.s. it's a good idea to run the cronjob so it avoids backing up your browser cache. That keeps the tar size down quite considerably.