[Gllug] best way of making backups

[Richard Jones]

On Sun, Sep 14, 2008 at 10:59:06AM +0100, Nahuel Marisi wrote:
> At the moment I make my backups (once every three months when I panic about
> my HD dieing) simply by copying the folders I want to backup and compressing
> it as a tar.bz2 file.

Compressing it is a bad idea.  The way that gzip & bzip2 work is that
an error at any point in the file can corrupt the entire remainder of
the file.

Well, OK that's not strictly true for bzip2 which can do some
block-based recovery (see the bzip2recover command), but even so I
wouldn't recommend relying on a compressed backup.

The way to use compression with backups is to compress each individual
file.  This is tricky to do with tar.  If your data is mostly
music/photos/video then the likelyhood is that it's compressed
already, so forget about compressing the backup.

> Obviously this is not the most organised or efficient
> way of making backups. So I was wondering what programs do you use or
> suggest in order to do this tedious but necessary task.

Where are you backing up to?

The simplest way I've found to do backups is to use 'rsync'.  Works
incrementally, can copy over the network, widely available, simple
command-line operation, etc.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat
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