Hello:
I am considering using an external USB drive as the storage for my backups.
I am running backup pc under Debian 5.0.
Part 1
What do I need to do to configure the USB disk as the target? (e.g. how do I
do it?)
The USB disk is currently formatted as a NTFS file system. Do I *need* to
reformat it to ext3? or other?
Part 2
Assume I am crazy paranoid about preserving backup data and I get a second
USB drive to serve as a backup to the first USB drive.
Also assume that I am not concerned about the bandwidth across the network
or the various buses.
>From a data reliability standpoint, is it better to run a backup session to
USB drive 1, and then repeat the backup to USB drive 2? OR
run a backup session to USB drive 1, and then copy the backup directories to
USB drive 2???
The first approach could have errors in different backed up files on disk 1
or 2 but given the odds, very unlikely that the same exact error would show
up
in the same exact way in the same file across both USB disks.
OTOH, the second approach would allow the exact error in the backup on USB
disk 1 to be copied to USB disk 2.
I am leaning towards repeating the backup on two drives.
My understanding is that files that are backed up (using either rsync or
smb) are 'encrypted' (for lack of a better word), and to view them I need to
use zcat.-True?
Also, can the backup profile be specified to perform complete data copies
periodically, as opposed to a baseline and then periodic incrementals?
Lastly, does anyone have a statistical number that represents the
probability of a backup file (e.g. on the target backup disk) containing an
error introduced
by the backup procedure? I know there are error probabilities for both disk
and tape reads/writes failures, but am wondering if anything like that
exists for the backup software. (A group I used to work with did this sort
of testing, and actually had some statistics on the reliability of backup
programs, wrt types of files, sizes, w/wo compression, and the types of
compression. Not sure the open source community would go through this type
of assessment - but thought I'd ask.
Thanks for your help
-John
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