[Gllug] best way of making backups

[t.clarke]

I guess you may have seen lots of better suggestions already.

My personal preference is to keep things dead simple:
1) buy a suitable size spare hard disc  (they are cheap these days!)
2) keep all your valuable data that you want to backup up in separate
filesystems from all the o-s stuff which you can always download in the
event of a catastrophe
3) create copy filesystems of those filesystems on your spare disc
4) do a daily overnight 'rsync' or 'ssync' to the backup filesystems

I have been using 'ssync' for ages which works fine for me accross local
discs. It is more 'bandwidth hungry' than rsync, as it doesn't (as far as I am
aware) do any fancy check-summing of file-blocks to establish which blocks have
changed and thus move those only. Instead it simply compares update times and
copies whole file, I believe.   However, where the copying is being done on
one machine, this will save cpu time at the expense of more data across the
bus.   You would have to suck and see to work out which works best.

Ssync seems to have disappeared from the usual internet sites, but I have the
source-code if anyone wants to try.

THere is always the chance of course that the spare disc might get fried at the
same time as the main one,  but if you use a USB drive or a drive in another
physical enclosure the chances are much reduced.


Tim
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