I've recently been thinking about backup strategy... following a painful re-install after dropping a clanger during a kernel upgrade. While this seems a very basic topic, I can find surprisingly little documentation about this on-line.
I need to address several entirely different kinds of backup: 1. A backup of my root & boot partitions in a working state. This should be a backup to DVD-RW(s) - and would not contain any user-data... but would provide a recovery point to get a working server as quickly as possible in the event of a drive failure. It would be fantastic if, in addition to this. there were some means to track which packages had been merged/updated since the backup was made - and a copy to be made of any configuration changes... The list of updated packages (and the versions to which they've been updated) and any changes to configuration files would be tiny and hence easy to backup via another approach. It would be fantastic if the backup DVDs were bootable and doing so would restore the backup. 2. I've many gigabytes of MP3 files stored in Artist/[year]Album/*.* hierarchy... which I extend sporadically. I'd like a backup of this (as organising it took lots of time) but a different approach is necessary here... I'd like to pack as many whole albums onto DVDRs as would fit, which I'd then number, and given a list detailing which albums are on which DVDs, I could also play albums from a DVD player attached to a hi-fi. I'd like to be prompted to backup each time N-Mb of new data has been added to my MP3 directory - and that the most recent DVD-R should be authored with minimum user intervention. 3. My home directory; subversion repositories and DBMS catalogues are backed-up to a remote account. I currently do this with a cron-job which takes dumps; creates tar files; AES encrypts then uploads using SSH to the remote site... which manages a history of 3 backups using a simple shell-script. This works OK, but it is very ad-hoc... and it won't scale as every backup requires that I upload a new copy - even if I've only made a trivial change to my data. It would be far better if an incremental update were possible - though I'm not willing to give up encryption of data I send off-site. Are there any packages which would make any (or all) of these tasks more straightforward or more efficient? -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
