John D. Mort wrote:
Just thought I'd take a quick poll, as the Bluray topic is starting to
brush against this subject.
What backup strategies are you using right now?
All I have is one system at home, nothing terribly critical on it.
Still, I couldn't find any backup apps that did exactly what I wanted,
so I wrote two bash scripts as cron jobs.
One script runs every night, and backs up selected directories into a
tarball on a dedicated partition on my USB external HD. It also copies
the tarball, when appropriate, to subdirectories "weekly" and/or
"monthly". (This script can even copy a different set of directories
for the weekly or monthly backup if desired.) It purges the daily
backup after a week, and purges the weekly backup after a month, but
keeps the monthly backups indefinitely. Oh, and since that partition is
ext3, I have a FAT32 partition on the same external HD that includes
programs for both Windows and Macs to read ext3 partitions, and to
extract files from the tarball. This is in case I have to recover my
backups from it using another system.
The other script runs once a week, and creates an ISO file containing
selected directories, not necessarily the same ones as the nightly
backup. The ISO file, when written, is individual files, not a
tarball. I write it to a DVD+RW (I have three and rotate them). About
once a month, I also write the ISO to a DVD+R, label it, and store it at
my parents' house half an hour away. (I explained to my mother that
that's all that "offsite backup" means, even though it sounds very
technical.) If the amount of data is small enough, I don't even have to
go there -- they can email me the file(s) from the DVD. That's the main
reason I made the DVD individual files, not a tarball.
The most important part of ANY backup method: I've tested the ability to
retrieve data from the tarballs and the DVDs, and know they work. Too
many people think they've made backups, only to discover they can't get
the data back out of them. There are some sorry (but entertaining)
examples at http://rinkworks.com/stupid/cs_backups.shtml .
Adam
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