Re: what and how to backup?

[steve]

Roger Searle wrote:
I need to be confident that I am backing up all my "important stuff", but am
not really sure what that might be.  In windows I can quickly add a bunch of
folders to a backup job and know that I've got everything in case of a total
failure.  But what should I back up in linux?  The home folder, of course,
and all my data files on a fat32 partition that I am accessing on windows as
well (which includes my email folders).  I realise that there is
(thankfully) no registry, but where are all the settings stored?  Is there
an equivalent of the "documents and settings" folders?  What is a "best
practice" for this type of backup?
And how to do this?  Create tar files and gzip them?  Is that "required
knowledge"?  Or are there better tools?
Then of course I need to automate this.  Cron jobs?  Or are there better
ways?
Roger

 

The first thing is to answer the question 'why am i backing up?' Sounds 
stupid, but there are really two separate reasons... to guard against a 
catastrophic system failure, and to recover from an accidental mistaken 
file deletion. For the former, I use a disk to disk backup of the whole 
system, onto an external USB drive. That way it's easy to recover from, 
and you can store it physically separate from your system. Technically, 
you should shut down as much software as possible, but I don't really 
bother too much. For the latter, you really need a completely different 
system. I use a tape drive on a remote Windoze server, running bacup 
exec, but that's not going to be cost effective for many people, and I 
only use it as I got paid in hardware for a job i did! But you do need a 
system that has a searchable index for an effective solution to this 
problem. I'd look at amanda... the free version used to allow for saving 
stuff to disk, but I'm not sure if it does any more. I tried to get it 
working with one of those tape drives that use an ide interface a couple 
of years ago, but it refused to do that.

Obviously, I'm talking a fairly serious setup here. Snapshots of system 
info can be burned onto CD/DVD, and scripts that use 'find / -mtime -1' 
can save all files that were changed in the last day.

All I'm really saying is that backing up your system isn't simple!
Steve