Neither my Internet speed, nor my very crowded WiFi speed which is even
slower are suitable for network backup.
I use pdumpfs which used to be in the repo, but is no longer. I'm looking at
glastree (GPL) for the future.
Both are simple disk to disk backups programs based on a Plan9 idea. First
time they copy the entire file tree to a subtree on the backup disk.
Subsequent times they create a fresh subtree on the backup volume using hard
links from the original subtree for unchanged files.
The beauty of this is that backups are simply a tree of ordinary files and
restore is very easy to do with the ordinary command line tools (e.g. cp -a).
Further most of my ~160GB personal data is new media, so I wouldn't really
save much space with compression (new media being in already compressed file
formats). I therefore save time versus compressing tools on both backup and
restore.
I also keep selected 'critical' personal data on a USB stick I carry with me
all the time. This is a poor person's off site backup. If I had a car I'd
put it in that.
