On Wed, May 09, 2007 at 06:10:53PM -0700, L Goodwin wrote: > Here's another round of dumb questions for ya: > > Can USB jump drives be used to back-up a Samba share? > If so, what do I need to do to prepare the USB drive > to accept files? > Since I don't really need to compress or encrypt, I > was thinking about simply copying the entire directory > tree using the cp command, instead of using dump, tar, > cpio.
If you don't want to save multiple versions of the same tree (from different dates), you could use rsync. It might be a lot quicker than cp because it skips files that haven't changed since the last backup. But unless your collection of files is almost as large as the USB drive, I would keep saving backups of different dates (with tar & gzip) until you run out of space and have to start deleting older backups. > Will this work, and is it a "good idea"? Certainly. > The filesystem to be backed up is a single common UFS > shared via Samba. All PC users have access to the same > set of files (no user-specific directories). The files > to be backed up are Word, Excel, PDF, etc. > > I don't want to buy the drives until I know if it will > work and how to do it. Do I need to UFS format the > drives? I assume the drive will have to be mounted > like any other drive... Reformatting as UFS seems a good idea. Most drives come with a FAT32 filesystem, which has to use large clusters (16 or 32k) on bigger drives. This can waste a lot of space if you're backing up lots of small files. Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table#FAT32 Additionally, you'll have to recompile the kernel to support FAT32 filesystems >128GB, IIRC. Roland -- R.F.Smith http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/ [plain text _non-HTML_ PGP/GnuPG encrypted/signed email much appreciated] pgp: 1A2B 477F 9970 BA3C 2914 B7CE 1277 EFB0 C321 A725 (KeyID: C321A725)
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