Re: Backup requirement

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Masatran, R. Deepak wrote:
My backup requirement is as follows:

Old laptop, for personal use, running Debian Etch. I intend to backup every
month to DVD via my external DVD writer, and to leave copies with friends.

DVD is unreliable and very, very slow, if compared to an external (usb)
hard drive. Besides, you need to play disk jockey quite a lot if you are
planning to backup your 80G of data once per month.

It depends on the value of your time, the required degree of reliability
and the relative prices of DVD vs. external HD, but I bet in most
scenarios of more than one DVD's worth of data being backed up, external
HDs are more efficient.

I want encryption. I use LUKS, but only for my home partition.

My hard drive is 80 giga-bytes big. My partitions are home, root, alternate
root, a data partition, and a Windows NTFS that I have not used in years :-)

Current solution is to "cp --archive" the home partition into an external
hard drive.

What's wrong with that? I'd stick with backing up to disk. I use rsync
and/or unison to backup my data keep old versions of files for some time
via the --backup and --backup-dir options of rsync. Therefore, if I
accidentially delete or modify a file I could get back to an older version.

If you copy your whole disk instead of just /home, you could in case of
hard drive failure just remove the external disk from its enclosure put
it into your laptop and be set. (Doesn't work with many new laptops,
which use a different type of hard disk than external ones. Check if the
types of your 'internal' and 'external' hard disk match, before relying
on this.)

I use GenISOImage and Wodim to burn my data CDs. Also, I prefer CPIO to Tar,
and command-line to GUI.

With the external disk you have the advantage that you can use the very
same filesystem for your backup as for your actual data.

HTH,
Johannes
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