[cumbria_lug] Separate user groups

[Simon Hobson]

Joachim wrote:

>I don't think we should have separate user groups but I do agree 
>there should be maybe a meeting in the south lakes i.e Barrow area 
>(pure self interest ;-) only ) and one in the North Lakes i.e. 
>Carlisle or Penrith.

I agree. As a mailing list we don't need to get too parochial, that 
just ends up with people on two lists and cross posting. But from a 
practical point of view, you can't (in general) expect people to 
travel from the other end of the county for get togethers.

>Simon - Thanks for the offer for the lift to the ManLUG, I might 
>take you up on this in the future. At the moment the miss is 
>complaining that I spent to much time on the computer and I don't 
>think she would be too happy me leaving her for a full day for a 
>Linux meeting.

It might be dangerous to suggest she comes too - we can drop her off 
at the Arndale centre and pick her up 3 hours later. Since I don't 
know what sort of person she is, it might be taken as an insult, or 
might be dangerous to your bank balance 8-O

>Does anyone know a good way to backup your system, mainly packages 
>installed and settings? i back up my files already to a SD card and 
>additionally to dropbox. I just want to know a way of quickly 
>recovering my system if I bugger it up again. Not Linux fault 
>usually my fault changing some settings or something.

Well I have several methods. The one I've settled on at work is to 
have a separate virtual machine hosting a store that the others sync 
files to with rsync (easy to set up in server mode). That gives me a 
central store from which I can rsync a copy back to any bare metal* 
or virtual machine** if I need to.
* Booted of a suitable live CD
** Can be done from the host by creating and mounting the filesystems.

I then create historical copies from that with storeBackup.
http://storebackup.org/

At home I've been using rdiff-backup 
(http://rdiff-backup.nongnu.org/), but I prefer storebackup.

rdiff-backup gives more compact backups, but the archive isn't really 
accessible without the rdiff-backup tools. storebackup basically 
makes each snapshot a complete image of the source - using hard links 
for files that haven't changed. storebackup can also delete interim 
backups whereas rdiff-backup can't*** as it would break the reverse 
diffs it uses.
*** I think

With some scripting you could roll something similar to storebackup 
with rsync - using rsync's ability to hard-link files to a another 
directory where the file hasn't changed.


Oh yes, and just for good measure, I also use Retrospect at home, and 
backup most of my linux boxes with that as well as my Macs.

-- 
Simon Hobson

Visit http://www.magpiesnestpublishing.co.uk/ for books by acclaimed
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