Michael Hahn wrote:
Duncan Anderson wrote:
As a further refinement, assuming that the amount of data being backed
up is a fraction of the size of the CD, one could specify that one is
writing to a multiple session CD in TAO mode. This may not work with
all cd writers, though.
This way one could have, say, a week's backups on one CD.
(The last session has to fixate the CD, so the cron job on the last
day would have to be different.
The backups are going to be about 10 megs tops - it's the attendance and
sales data for a small swimschool. In any case, I was hoping to back up
at midnight, and then each morning swap out the current CD for one that
was used 3 days ago, the current one being put into our new fire safe.
That way, even if there was a fire the most we would lose is the current
day - we'd have yesterday's backup to work from.
Well, if you put your script in /etc/cron.daily, it will be run at a
little after 4:02 in the morning. (The exact time depends on where in
the order it falls, and how long the jobs before it take.) But you could
change the time in /etc/crontab. Just make sure it is after midnight. Or
you can use crontab -e as was first suggested. But the standard time
should work fine for the amount of data you are talking about.
Do you want to save the backups past the 3 day rotation, or does the new
backup replace the old one? Also, are you planning on using rewritable
CDs? For the amount of data you are backing up, I would be tempted to
use ether a ZIP drive or a memory card for the backups if you are only
interested in keeping them for 3 days.
Thinking about it, you may want to use "date -d yesterday +%F" instead
of "date +%F" to generate the date for your backup directory. That way,
the date matches the day the data is for, instead of the day it was
backed up.
One other thought - you could use memory cards or ZIP disks for the
daily backups, but leave the backup directories on the hard drive as
well. Then once a month, at the start of the new month, burn last
month's backups to a CD, and delete the old month's backups. (A script
in /etc/cron.monthly works well for this.)
Mikkel
--
Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons,
for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!
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