On Sat, 11 Mar 2017 09:10:54 -0600 Richard Owlett <rowl...@cloud85.net> wrote:
> I've been good about telling others that backups are a good idea. > Guess who hadn't and then crashed his system and spent hours putting > things back together ;< > > In the past individual projects ended up on individual flash drives > as I was frequently using different machines. I now have some > reliable hardware and a large internal hard drive. > > I have one partition that might be called a "production" environment, > i.e. fairly stable and has the most valuable content. > A second partition hosts my experiments - I've a project to create an > optimal install. The third is the target of those experimental > installs whose content doesn't rate explicit backups. The scripts for > creating those installs being on the second partition. > > I've vague ideas of what backup pattern(s) I might follow. > I'm looking for reading materials that might trigger "I hadn't > thought of that" moments. > > Suggestions? This is a well-known joke (and advert): http://www.taobackup.com/ but does touch briefly on most backup issues. And here's an old page that discusses the issues of snapshot-style backups: http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/ There are more recent implementations of this kind of thing, but this tutorial makes you think about what's going on, and what you might need to go on. Note that using LVM with some spare drive space allows online volume snapshots, along the lines of the Windows Volume Shadow Copy system. But you can enable and disable the LVM snapshot, thereby avoiding the significant overhead on disc writes when you don't need it. It is assumed that Windows users need the facility continuously. One unusual point of view nowadays: given the existence of encryption ransomware, I think there is still a place for optical discs for offline snapshots of actual user data, the OS being far too large now, of course, and USB sticks are still a bit expensive for a frequent write-once-keep-for-years backup scheme. I use truecrypt files on my laptop of around 4GB, so I can dump them to DVD every week or so (yes, I actually have a laptop with an optical drive). -- Joe
