-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Philippe Landau wrote: > What can a simple user use to backup his installation ? > > Also what simple backup solution do you recommend > for your personal data ? > > I hope this is not too repetitive. > http://opensuse-community.org/ does not discuss it > and apparently the OpenSuse Wiki only points to opensuse.org. > > Kind regards Philippe
This is an old topic, but well worth reviewing. People have mentioned various solutions, and a little while back I had a look at most of these options.... The thing to note with a backup is that is nearly useless unless you are able to get back what you have backed up. Whatever solution you choose, verify you can recover data with it in the way that you want it. 1) Dar in some ways the most limited of the options, to effectively be used with removable media some scripting is required. It can be considered as basically Tar with most of the more sophisticated options removed. It is not particularly fast in operation. KDar the gui frontend when I last looked at it made only limited use of the limited number of Dar options available. This is the simplest option. It also has some minor limitations on what it will store. It is designed to be used with removable and fixed media (but not really tapes), and I am not entirely convinced about how usable it would be if one only wanted to recover a single file. 2) Tar is the old staple (with star as its posix compliant cousin). It has an intimidating number of options, but it is reliable and very powerful. It is worth reading the info documentation (the man page is more likely to confuse someone who has not dealt with tar before). While originally designed for tape backups it is much more than that now. 3) Rsync is the most powerful option, however I not completely convinced that it is really suited to the home user for personal data backup. It is not suited for use with removable media and you will need a dedicated external storage either on a usb drive or on a server. 4) Bacula is a tape orientated backup solution, as is Taper ( http://taper.sourceforge.net/). Bacula is not exactly easy to setup, and Taper has some serious limitations on how much it will backup and what it will backup to (and it is five years since the last update). I have noticed a test version of something called gadminburn, but this requires cdrecord (does not seem to like wodim) and runs only in root. As data backup and archive solutions 1) and 2) do have a major limitation in that information on the backup is limited to each backup. Tracking of different versions of file over time has to be done independently of the backup application. Rsync can be configured to do this but unless you have a large amount of of constantly changing personal data is probably a bit of overkill. Option 2) and 3) are best used as part of overnight jobs, but 1) could be workable as a manual operation. The days when someone slammed a floppy in the drive and copied the days work then turned the machine are long gone... But for most home users something that does something similar is really all that they require, Personally I have a daily cron scripts that does backups up to DVD with tar. (Hopefully, soon to be replaced with a archive script that is a work in progress). - -- ============================================================================== I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone. Bjarne Stroustrup ============================================================================== -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with SUSE - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFHQWViasN0sSnLmgIRAnOUAKCtlp/XPdBFAKkGqVbNoU6A+DkmWACgsO2l gOlIKvlzuZYyP8Usz2D35ak= =ET9s -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
