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View Full Version : Thoughts on Backing Up your System



nickburns
July 28th, 2007, 01:47 AM
I tried to start a thread on backing-up, but it fell into the tread graveyard.

I want to know what everyone does to backup their system. What they backup and why. The biggest piece I would like to know is what system do you use and why. (Like rsync or some program, etc....)

Thanks for all your input.

aysiu
July 28th, 2007, 01:56 AM
I use
rsync -av /source /destination It's simple, and it doesn't take up a lot of time, since it will copy only new or modified files.

bread eyes
July 28th, 2007, 02:30 AM
I use the identity function to backup my data.

smoker
July 28th, 2007, 02:36 AM
i tend to just connect up an external drive and drag over the main stuff in my home partition, not very elegant, but with my way of working, incremental backups aren't really possible, besides, it doesn't take that long.

i don't bother backing up the os, ubuntu is that quick to install now, and i'm forever changing the look, so a reinstall would give me an excuse to try new things, rather than be an inconvenience to me that a backup image would allay!

rfruth
July 28th, 2007, 02:40 AM
Mine is pretty simple so I use TAR:)

starcraft.man
July 28th, 2007, 03:42 AM
Drive imaging for the majority. I back up the images to an external usb. For data, I make redundant copies of important files across my 2 HDs and USB drive. I'm a simple backup person.

init1
July 28th, 2007, 03:45 AM
I don't backup at all. I should, especially since one of my partitions is dieing.

SunnyRabbiera
July 28th, 2007, 03:50 AM
I use a seagate external HD, seagate externals are ultra awesome with linux

jdong
July 28th, 2007, 04:47 AM
I use an external hard drive, usually cheaply bought via an enclosure and a great HDD online deal. I choose almost exclusively Seagate media -- I will refuse to use any other hard drive brands unless they are SCSI or rated for server use.

As far as backup tools it depends on the job. My home directory is backed up with rdiff-backup, which is essentially a nonfancy version of Apple's Time Machine.

My root filesystems that are XFS are backed up with xfsdump, while non-XFS ones I will usually tarball up every time I make a very significant change.


Every month or so when I get bored, I'll test my backup regime with a test restore onto a spare hard drive and a bootup. I've caught on two occasions backup script/methodology errors that left me with an incomplete restore -- it is really really important to test backups.

strabes
July 28th, 2007, 06:31 AM
I manually copy entire contents of /home to the backup folder on my external hard drive before I go to bed every couple of days. On my dell laptop everything works out of the box (except fglrx) so I have minimal work to do after a fresh install + copying back home dir.

herbster
July 28th, 2007, 07:25 AM
Simple Backup does a full backup every Sunday, which I burn to DVD-RW, and have a cronjob that rsyncs it to my webspace, as well as a cronjob rsync'ing my /home to my webspace nightly. It's bootyful!

beercz
July 28th, 2007, 08:31 AM
Every day I backup to a another machine (a linux box running debian).

For this I use rsnapshot (http://rsnapshot.org), and it is done automatically via cron. I write the results to a log file for examination.

It's fast, it works very well, it's easy (once set up) as it is automated and reliable.

Been using it for years.

And I sleep very well at night thank you very much,

Backup is something I don't worry about.

Ozor Mox
July 28th, 2007, 01:52 PM
About once a week, I plug my external hard drive in and do


sudo rsync -avn --del /home/me/Desktop/MyBigFolderFullOfEverything /media/disk

to show me what has changed on my computer since the last backup, then


sudo rsync -av --del /home/me/Desktop/MyBigFolderFullOfEverything /media/disk

to actually copy the changes to my external drive.

I then occasionally use the same commands to rsync my external drive with my other computer, so that I have three copies of all my files in case of extreme catastrophes involving my computer and my backup drive at the same time.

DugieHowsa
July 28th, 2007, 02:33 PM
I use S3 Backup and utilize Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3). I backup all my pictures, home movies and documents to it. All of this is stored on a SimpleTech NAS, but since the device does not have RAID, I feel better that its backed up somewhere else. And at 10 cents a GB, I hardly even notice the cost on my monthly billing statement.

NiklasV
July 28th, 2007, 02:58 PM
I unfortunately don't do much backup on any of my computers, but on the rare occasions I do, I usually just email some files I'm working on to myself with gmail.

On my parent's computer, I've set up an init script to use rdiff to backup the home directory to a second internal drive automatically when the computer shuts down.