On 17/08/12 10:07 AM, Emil Payne wrote:
On 08/17/2012 04:20 AM, Gary Dale wrote:
On 17/08/12 04:40 AM, Emil Payne wrote:
I have a 1 TB external USB drive with 362 GB used. I'd like to do a
full backup to DVDs and then an incremental (or something) backup
every month or two, also to DVDs or CDs. I'd like the backups to be
compressed in order to save space (i.e. - the number of DVDs/CDs
used). What is a good program to do this with? Or, what is a good
step of different programs to do this with? I'm a home user with
decent knowledge of Debian/Linux, but not a shell programmer.
Depending on your data, compression may or may not be useful. Video
and audio data is usually already optimally compressed.
4.5G on a DVD is also not terribly useful if you want to back up
large amounts of data. BluRay writers are cheap enough these days,
and BD-RE discs are not too expensive. BD-R discs are even cheaper
for doing an archival backup.
You don't say what you are backing up. If it is the data on the
external drive, you may want to consider getting a second drive and
backing up to that. It's a lot easier than manually swapping discs.
In this case, you could try Bacula. It's not too difficult to set up
and quite flexible.
All the folders in my home folder (except "desktop") is a link to a
folder on the backup drive. These are: Backups, Documents, Downloads,
Favorites, Memos, Music, MyPDA, Pictures, Programs, Projects, Public,
Temp, Templates, Themes, Utilities & Videos. Also, I have the entire
filesystem for this computer and for a separate Windows 7 computer
copied in tar.gz format. (I connect the drive directly to the Windows
box via the usb cable to do that.) There is also a separate "Backup"
folder on the backup drive where I have a couple of programs running
backups /home, /opt & /var and where I also back up cells phones for
friends and relatives (8 at the moment) and things like my camera and
Palm PDA SD cards.
(Speaking of tar.gz; what is a good format for compression for this
varied type of info? I've access to about 20 different formats on this
box.)
This is the type of stuff I want to make a safe backup of. I've
already lost all the info on the drive once several months back when
someone defragged it when it was hooked up to the windows box. I have
a ton of old CDs collected from about 10 years of use that I was able
to (with a lot of pain and work) get quite a bit of data back from.
The suggestion of a blue ray drive and disk or a secondary drive sound
like a good one.
Any other suggestions for things I haven't thought of?
Whether or not optical is a PITA depends on how much data you have to
back up. If it fits onto a single disc, it's great. Otherwise you may
want to look at other options. BluRay can hold 24G - 45G depending on
the number of layers.
I haven't seen BD-RE in double layer yet, so assume 24G for now. For me,
that's more than sufficient to back up all my work in a year. BD-RE is
good for a long time, depending on usage, and is simple to use.
I prefer lzma compression for tars. It's a bit slower than some, but
gives really good compression.
Never rely on a single backup. I keep multiple archives of old work on
optical discs, in addition to a live copy and a live backup copy on a
separate file system on the same RAID5 array. That's actually not all
that safe (the RAID array could fail), but the live backup copy is
mainly used if I accidentally delete the wrong file.
I don't recommend backing up entire file systems very often. It's your
data, not the programs, that are critical. You may also want to back up
/etc since it contains your system settings and is highly compressible.
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