DJA wrote: > If, by full backup, you mean OS+data, is that really necessary for a > home LAN? Since I tend to upgrade on about the same cycle as Fedora, > re-installing the OS is pretty much a no-brainer anymore. Nearly all of > any data I have that is important, including on my file server is > contained in the /home partitions.
You are absolutely right. I only backup the OS+Data (i.e. everything) because I used to back up just home and /etc and /usr/local and still occasionally found I was missing things. So backing up / and excluding /proc and /sys and a few other things are the only way to go it seems. The OS is just a gig or two anyhow. A small fraction of my data to be backed up. But just like you, when I do an actual reinstall I do normally just upgrade the OS to the latest release. > So you are going to use the drives just for incremental backups? Are you > planning on rotating those two HD's or buying more? I'd be interested if > you explained a bit about your process. That is, how often do you make > incrementals, and how many backup sets (full and incremental) you use > for a home LAN. I do plan to rotate the drives. I bought two because anything actually attached to my computer all the time could somehow be wiped out when the main drive gets wiped out. I think I will keep a monthly full backup on DVD off-site, a weekly full backup on the HD, nightly incrementals on the HD, and after the full backup of the week on the HD finishes I will swap the drives so all of the incrementals from that point on go onto the other drive. That way I always have a full backup not connected to the computer no more than a week old, nightly incrementals on the disk plugged into the computer, and a copy off-site on DVD. I believe backups should be as automatic as possible because if we have to do them manually they will not get done. The HD's should be plenty big enough to hold a couple full backups and two weeks worth of incrementals each, which is what they will be getting if I swap them once a week and don't expire the data for a month. This way I never have to change the media except once a week. The DVD's will be kept for 6 months before expiring. Total money invested in this very secure backup scheme: $80 for each HD, $200 for a DVD writer, and $50 worth of DVD media. And really just the DVD or just the HD's alone would probably be sufficient for most people. The DVD has already paid for itself as far as I am concerned. I have had to restore from it a couple of times. > So what backup software, if any, do you recommend for us mere mortals? That's a tough one. Backups suck. :( They always get complicated it seems. If your needs are simple I would just script a cron job to tgz up all of your data and copy it somewhere once a day. > Ahh. So does this imply you do incrementals daily on your home LAN? Yep. In fact it is past 12am and an incremental backup just finished to the DVD currently in the drive. My daily incrementals seem to come out to around 20M except for my incremental of the webserver which always comes out at 1.5G because Zope stores everything in one zodb file called Data.fs and I have all of my photos in there. Haven't figured any good way around that yet. -- Tracy R Reed http://copilotconsulting.com -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
