On Tuesday 15 June 2010 14:40:44 Camaleón wrote: > On Tue, 15 Jun 2010 11:32:15 +0100, Lisi wrote: > > On Tuesday 15 June 2010 01:25:56 Andrew Sackville-West wrote: > >> There are many many ways to make take backups beyond having a disk big > >> enough to hold the data. > > > > Would you feel inclined to elaborate? I'm trying to solve this problem > > for my granddaughter's large HDD, and am not keen to have to buy a 300GB > > external drive. Tar would still require a fairly large medium. :-( > > I would differentiate between "backup" data and "archived" data. > > By "backup" I see a copy of the current files in the system and as per > "archived" data I understand it as several snapshots of the data taken in > different days and so holding different data. > > Backup usually takes less space than archival, but sometimes archival is > necessary (a "must have" in a company). > > The most common procedure for a user's POV in order to get a data backup > is by using a "differential" backup with some kind of compression. The > first copy of the data will take all the files the user has selected to > be backed up but the rest of the times the copy is only > "differential" (only new or modified files are selected to be copied). > > This way (by using a differential backup strategy) you need less space in > the medium (the first copy is big, but the rest of the differential > copies are of small size and so the copy procedure is very quick). > > There are also those called "incremental" backups, but I find it a bit > more complex to manage that "differential" ones, as per data restoration: > with a differential backup yo only need the first big file and the last > differential copy, but in order to restore from an incremental backup you > need the first big file plus "all" the incremental ones). > > As per the programs to make backups... I still use "tar" (:-P) but > "rsync" is said to be one of the most mentioned/preferred for this task.
Thanks for this. I was originally responding to Andrew's saying: <quote> There are many many ways to make take backups beyond having a disk big enough to hold the data. </quote> I can think of very few - and was interested in what he was thinking of. Incremental/differential backups are not really practical, since she will be at school. A periodic dd (or Clonezilla?) of the whole drive and more frequent updates of her personal data (of which I understand that there is not much) would be the optimum, but a trifle pricey, so I am still looking at alternative possibilities. Lisi -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/201006151548.04355.lisi.re...@gmail.com
