[SLUG] Backup

[Gavin Baker]

On 29 Oct 2006, at 15:34, john at johnallsopp.co.uk wrote:

>>> Now I've 15 partitions and it turns out that's the most I can have.
>>> So
>>> while I might have a 150Gb drive, I'm only using half of it.
>>
>> Personally, for a 150GB drive, I wouldn't partition it at all. Well,
>> I would have a swap partition rather than use a swap file, but
>> however you chop it up, chances are you are gonna end up with spare
>> space where you don't need it, and a full partition where you do.
>
> Aye, well that's how most people seem to do it, but I was trying to do
> it by the book, as it were. I think, though, the rule I'm trying to
> follow is more for servers than for personal setups.

The books strategy probably made more sense a few years ago, when  
'servers' had ~20GB scsi discs costing a fortune.

The way that seems the best to me, and the way most (decent) hosting  
companies handle their backups is to have 2 discs and a cron script  
that mounts the second disc purely to backup /home. If you don't want  
dated backups, you could even just use rsync. You can get an 80GB ata  
disc for less than £30... I think this is what I will do, when I get  
around to it.

Also, backup utilities (Steven mentioned some) will take your 150GB  
and write a backup onto multiple dvd's, you don't have to create  
partitions of that size of course.

It just seems a little restrictive to have such small partition  
sizes. You could backup the raw partitions onto dvd's and use  
something like LVM to span a filesystem over multiple partitions, but  
it's still a bit of pain for very little reward.

Good luck,
hope you find something that works for you,
Gav