On 16 August 2010 03:15, Alex Schuster <wo...@wonkology.org> wrote: > Nganon <nganon+gen...@gmail.com <nganon%2bgen...@gmail.com>> writes: > > > Hello all, > > > > My first post on the list. I thought I would start with something > > that I started > > to think of as 'essential' after losing 90GB of data. Now I have two > > main questions in mind: what to and how to back up on gentoo most > > efficiently. > > > > 1. Apart from users' home directories and the followings, what should > > be backed > > up on a gentoo machine? > > /etc/portage/ > > /root > > /var/lib/portage > > ...? > > Wouldn't it be easier to just backup the whole / directory? > Excluding /home, /usr/portage and /var/tmp/portage? > > Yes but that would not solve my huge backup file problem, would it?
> > 2. Erm..okay, I am gonna say, what magic I want and then ask your way. > > I first started making gzipped tar balls as follows: > > > > tar czpf /media/backups/userA-`date +%Y.%m.%d`.tgz -X > > userA-excludelist /etc > > > > But these can get huge especially for home dirs. I also want safe dvd > > copies. > > Though I can find enough space on the external drives, I don't trust > > them any more. See above..sigh..(No I recovered about one third of it > > with testdisk/photorec > > which names them as file000001 file00002.. and half them are zero > > sized.. which > > quite justifies my agony) > > Okay, but I don't trust DVDs. Although DVD-RAM is quite safe I heard. > But external disks are flexible, offer more space, and if you want more > security, just use yet another drive, so you are safe even if your main > drive and a backup drive fails. > > I did not give a thought to DVD-RAM before. Will give it a try. Thanks. I suggest you have a look at rdiff-backup. It gives you a 1:1 copy of > the source directory, but also does incremental backups, which are > stored (in compressed form) in an additional folder in the destination > directory. I would use this at least for things like /etc, where I > sometimes might want to retrieve an old version of a file. Similar to > your approach with big tar files and small ones containing the > increments. > > I just emerged and tried it. Seems like incremental backups was what I was looking for. But from what I see, it is mirroring the src to dist and storing the metadata/stats of increments as archived. Maybe there is an option to archive increments along side their metadata as well. I will keep playing with it. I use a script for my backups, which I mentioned here on 2010-05-07, > subject 'Snackup'. It optionally creates LVM snapshots so I can make > backups from the running system, even if the source directory is > altered during the backup. This works on LVM only, though, and also > allows the volume to be LUKS-encrypted. It does backups by rdiff-backup, > rsync, cp, tar or dd. It may be overkill when not using the LVM > features, but still I suggest to use some script for backups, so one > does not always have to remember the backup commands. When I want to > update my backup, I enter something like 'snackup boot root home src', > and the script backs up my boot, root and home partition in the > background, and creates tar files each directory in /usr/src. > > I found the thread and script. I am gonna take a look at it. Once I decide on how to backup, I am gonna cron a script for it. > > By the way, since I want dvd backups as well, and I want to use +rw > > dvds so I can overwrite old backup after a while, what is best way of > > ensuring the integrity and safety of them. Is it a good idea to use > > truecrypt containers? Or nothing tops signing and encrypting with gpg? > > I'd use DVD-RAM. The media is a little more expensive, but AFAIK they > were made with long-time backups in mind. And access is much easier, > you just copy the files as to an external drive, no need to burn ISOs. > > Wonko > > Thanks for the advises.
