* Joe Emenaker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [070212 04:49]: > > I've looked at bacula and that is *way* more than what I need. > > Support for incremental backups to existing sets would be nice, but only if > the > restore tool could look at the entire download set at once. > > What is everyone else using to backup their laptops?
I use backup2l. It is very simple and command-line driven. The configuration to identify which files to backup could be a little more convenient, but it couldn't be any more flexible. It uses two separate variables that get passed as arguments to find: the first is a list of directories to backup (must not include tests, but can include options like -xdev), e.g. (/boot /etc /root /home -xdev); the second is a list of tests used to exclude files, e.g. (-path "*.nobackup*" -o -name "*.o" -o -name "*~"). The defaults are reasonable, but will need minor tweaking for most peoples individual setups. If you are familiar with find, you can use very complicated criteria. Once it is set up, backups are taken daily. You should have anacron installed so that if the daily backup would have happened while the laptop is off, it will happen soon (5-10 min) after booting. You can also set it to only do backups manually. It uses a hierarchy of full, incremental, and differential backups, with the goal of getting the best range of historical backups with a minimum of disk space. Finding a file (or files) as it was on a certain date is easy. By default, the backups are .tar.gz, so you can use standard tools to find files in the backups if you don't want to (or can't) use backup2l to restore them. You can choose another archive form if you want. > > An unrelated question: When I was looking through aptitude for backup > programs, > I noticed that it now shows tags ("admin::backup", "interface::text-mode", > etc.). It seems like a fantastic way to search for all of Debian's offerings > for a certain task. However, I can't find any mention of how to get aptitude > to > filter based on these tags, and I also can't find how to get www.debian.org's > package search page to let you search based on tags. How are we supposed to > use > them? You can open Views/New Debtags Browser. You can also use ~Gtag in a search pattern. I also recommend the package "packagesearch". The package "aptitude-doc" can also be very helpful; it will install html files under /usr/share/doc/aptitude/. > > - Joe ...Marvin -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]