-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Masatran, R. Deepak wrote: > My backup requirement is as follows: > > Old laptop, for personal use, running Debian Etch. I intend to backup every > month to DVD via my external DVD writer, and to leave copies with friends.
DVD is unreliable and very, very slow, if compared to an external (usb) hard drive. Besides, you need to play disk jockey quite a lot if you are planning to backup your 80G of data once per month. It depends on the value of your time, the required degree of reliability and the relative prices of DVD vs. external HD, but I bet in most scenarios of more than one DVD's worth of data being backed up, external HDs are more efficient. > I want encryption. I use LUKS, but only for my home partition. > > My hard drive is 80 giga-bytes big. My partitions are home, root, alternate > root, a data partition, and a Windows NTFS that I have not used in years :-) > > Current solution is to "cp --archive" the home partition into an external > hard drive. What's wrong with that? I'd stick with backing up to disk. I use rsync and/or unison to backup my data keep old versions of files for some time via the --backup and --backup-dir options of rsync. Therefore, if I accidentially delete or modify a file I could get back to an older version. If you copy your whole disk instead of just /home, you could in case of hard drive failure just remove the external disk from its enclosure put it into your laptop and be set. (Doesn't work with many new laptops, which use a different type of hard disk than external ones. Check if the types of your 'internal' and 'external' hard disk match, before relying on this.) > I use GenISOImage and Wodim to burn my data CDs. Also, I prefer CPIO to Tar, > and command-line to GUI. With the external disk you have the advantage that you can use the very same filesystem for your backup as for your actual data. HTH, Johannes -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFIIGaKC1NzPRl9qEURAqPBAJ9Fo0IVbQ/RU2ljDCsKdjZt7gymsgCeOosi ZLPpDoFkd9rLzAfEY+rP93g= =vUVt -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
