What backup scheme do you use?

[järven]

Like the title says, what backup scheme do you use?

I am asking since I don't do much backup myself, all I do is copy and paste my important files to an external hard drive. I want to do more but there are just so much information out there that it gets kind of hard to choose applications and ways to backup your data. So I hoped maybe those of you who have come up with a good scheme for backuping your data and system could share so I and others can be inspired . It would of course be positive for you too since you can get ideas from others and people can also make suggestions on how you could improve your backup scheme.

To precise my question a bit it would be good if you for example could answer this about your backup scheme:

Why you have chosen the way you do it and what computer situation you're in (do have one laptop or 5 desktops? for example), what applications you use and what features you take advantage of, how often you do your backups and if it's automated or not etc.


Please note that I am not asking you to make any howtos or anything, one can probably find howtos to most applications through google and on their homepage, but of course you can link to to some if you want.

[Woody70_06]

I back up my hme directory regularly, but other then that I don't image or clone..its not worth the time

I can reinstall Ubuntu, and be fully updated and configed in about 2 hours...so it seems to work out ok

[raymondh]

A good friend of mine (presence1960) introduced me to this 2-pronged approach..... and I have used it already to recover.

For normal back-ups, I use RSYNC in conjunction with the GUI, GRSYNC. Both of which can be found in the repos. I do a weekly back-up schedule unless required otherwise.

The other 'safety' net is I use is PING to create image/s of my partitions and the whole HD. These images are saved in an external source ..... as well as in a specific HD (I have multi-HD set-up) just in case I lose the external.

Also, I have used aptonCD to save/restore/transfer my apps

Regards,

[järven]

A good friend of mine (presence1960) introduced me to this 2-pronged approach..... and I have used it already to recover.

For normal back-ups, I use RSYNC in conjunction with the GUI, GRSYNC. Both of which can be found in the repos. I do a weekly back-up schedule unless required otherwise.

The other 'safety' net is I use is PING to create image/s of my partitions and the whole HD. These images are saved in an external source ..... as well as in a specific HD (I have multi-HD set-up) just in case I lose the external.

Also, I have used aptonCD to save/restore/transfer my apps

I was thinking about doing kind of the same thing, backup most of my files weekly and cloning my partitions monthly (well I guess cloning would depend on if I have done many changes to the system). I haven't heard of aptonCD but from reading some on their sourceforge page I suppose you use it to backup your applications, as a complement to RSYNC since that only backup files(?). That seems like a good idea, which I might add to my original backup plan.

[järven]

I thought people would be a little more interested in this topic, oh well.

[Mighty_Joe]

I thought people would be a little more interested in this topic, oh well.

Read the numerous topics of people wailing and crying because their system is borked and they can't get to the precious files which they have not backed up and you won't be surprised that few people have backups.
My scheme is simple: keep a copy my files on a 1TB external drive. Most of my data is media (movies, music) that doesn't change so versioning is not a problem. The really valuable files (baby pictures of my boys, for instance) get backed up to DVD and stored offsite.
As Woody70_06 said, I can get a new machine up and running in no time, so it's not worth the time or trouble to image the OS or applications.

[lisati]

My usual method is to manually copy files I wish to back up either directly to an external HDD or via another machine, occasionally taking the time to review what I have on my external HDDs and deleting stuff I'm unlikely to need again.

[amsterdamharu]

Use dsl on a usb to back up mbr and partition tables of the partitions with dd (back up on the usb). You can then write that back on your hd when it becomes unbootable and you haven't changed the partition layout: BE CAREFULL WITH DD COMMAND, IT CAN DESTROY YOUR HARDDISK.
backup
dd if=/dev/sda of=sda.bin bs=512 count=1
dd if=/dev/sda1 of=sda1.bin bs=512 count=1
...
restore
dd if=sda.bin of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1
dd if=sda1.bin of=/dev/sda1 bs=512 count=1

Use ghost to make a copy of my windows partition because that one breaks down quite often. Ghost is on a dos image file on the usb that syslinux and memdisk will start.

Use tar to make a backup of my linux system (started from the usb):
tar -cvpzf /sda5/backup/backup.tar.gz -–exclude=/sda5/backup --exclude=/sda5/lost+found --exclude=/sda5/sys --exclude=/sda5/mnt --exclude=/sda5/media --exclude=/sda5/home /sda5/
You can see from the above that I don't use seporate /boot and /home partitions

All these backups go to a hidden partition for windows and root only for Ubuntu:
in the /etc/fstab
/dev/sda2 /media/backup vfat nouser,noauto,noexec,rw 0 0

Some documents and photos go in there as well and then for some just to be extra safe go on my other computer's harddisk. I have to change the fstab line first to be able to mount it:
/dev/sda2 /media/backup vfat user,noauto,noexec,ro 0 0

But I would not be surprised that I will sometimes still loose that document or pictuere after I screwed up and deleted some stuff I shouldn't have.

I am not keen on re-installing and re-configuring everything again so the 2gb of the system backup is worth it (windows doesn't have a lot of big programs installed and I guess Ubuntu hasn't either). So that's why and (see above) how I back it up.

Mighty_Joe has a good point of storing the really important stuff off site and preferable multiple locations. Many of my photos are at my mums and my brothers home.

[KeLa]

Earlier system i used tar to make backups to external disk but now i have one server with raid on it where i rsync all changes periodically and also one disk network box for extra copy of extra important data.
I think that server's raid is safe enough in most cases because it has hot swap disks and if one disk fails and i can change it to new before next fails all data is safe.

[andrewbrown22]

I use a combination of rsync & cron as well as simple copy and paste.
I have a desktop and a server that I use to keep copies of my files on. I've recently upgraded them both to gigabit ethernet and it makes my backing up much quicker.
I setup cron and rsync to copy the "Documents" folder on my server (which is kept up to date from my laptop with copy and paste) to my Desktop's "Documents" folder every morning at 4am.
Every Monday at 4:30am I've set up my crontab to sync my ~70GB of Music from my server to my desktop.
I find this to work very well, runs in the background and I have nothing to worry about.

I also (about monthly) will plug in an eSATA drive (1TB) and exactly mirror the contents of the 1TB drive in my server with all my extra data.

This way I've got at least 3 local copies on my network as well as an external copy in case it hits the fan as they say.