On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 11:22 PM, Adam <[email protected]> wrote: > 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.
I used to have a similar system, but then I was "enlightened" by the wonders of git and now I tend use it for just about everything i don't want to lose ;) There are probably easier ways to do this, but I think version control works just fine for backups. So now my machines use shell scripts and git to push backups to their representative branches of my central repository. Since I have a lot virtual os images git helps to consolidate large amounts of space due to the way git only cares about hashes of data and not the contents. Another perk is that it is really easy to merge config files between several machines since that is what it was made for. For peace of mind my central rep also gets rsynced by rsync.net twice a week for $5 a month (which, after a student discount, is the cheapest data backup option imho). One problem I have with this setup is that you can't really delete data from git without rebasing, which can be a painful procedure. -- - Max Shkurygin _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium May 5 - Crack and LLVM Jun 2 - Android Jul 7 - Patent Absurdity - The Movie
