Today the adapter to use my 1TB SSD in my new laptop arrove, and I have it installed and mounted. So now I want to make some changes to the way I do backups. A little preliminary info re my motivations will be helpful.
I bought my very first computer in 1978, and ever since I have *never* lost data due to a hard drive failure. Yes, I've had drives fail a couple of times, but that the failure was imminent was always obvious in plenty of time for me to make sure that my data was safe. And these days all my drives have SMART data, which I check every few months or so. Therefore, I have always followed the policy of making full backups only when I am about to do something serious - like a dist-upgrade or such. While I have never lost data due to a drive failure, at least once every few months I accidentally delete a file that I shouldn't have. This is exactly the problem that using Trash was supposed to alleviate; i.e., you move it to the Trash instead of deleting it. It's been a decade and a half since I used Windows, but that is always what I used to do. Windows would not count the Trash as real, and if I needed the space for a file save, it would make the space by deleting the oldest files in the trash. Well, that's not how Linux seems to do things. Imagine my surprise one day while new in my use of Linux when I got an error message that a file could not be saved because I was out of room. I thought I had hundreds of GB of free space, so I was sitting there going 'WTH'? Ever since I have just never used the Trash. But now I am considering setting up a cron job to do backups to the 1TB SSD. I didn't do this before because my old computer had only 512G for / and /home, and I often needed the SSD for storage. My new computer has a 1TB NVMe for / and /home, and each partition is only about 30% used, so I no longer need the SSD for storage. The SSD is always mounted at /media/jjj/Data, set up in fstab. So I am thinking of creating two folders on it, Root and Home, and create cron jobs something like this: 0 3 * * * rsync -avx --delete / /media/jjj/Data/Root 0 3 * * * rsync -avx --delete /home /media/jjj/Data/Home I probably haven't got the syntax quite right, and there may be things in / that shouldn't be backed up. And I should probably make the second one start half an hour later or so, or combine them somehow. (Cron scares me; it was written for people far smarter than me.) Added thought: This does not need to be a clone of the partitions with dd or such. I just want to be able to recover a single file or folder that I shouldn't have deleted. Suggestions welcome! _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
