Re: Partitioning a back up drive--request for comments.

Stefan Patric wrote:
...
On Mon, 21 Apr 2008 18:54:58 -0700, pureheart wrote:
Then I have to decide if I'm going to use 'tar' or 'rsync'. I've got
plenty of room and compression does not seem to be critical, plus the
firewire connection seems to have all the speed I'd need.

Since you are not backing up to another host or over a network, you don't need to use rsync. Tar will do just fine.

Rsync works perfectly well within or between local file systems. I would strongly recommend rsync over tar for backups, unless you're writing to a tape, or otherwise need a single mega file. Also, rsync will generally be faster, maybe hugely so, since it does not recopy unchanged files.

For backing up your Windows system, I suggest that you use a Windows archiving app. It will make life easier, if you need to do a recovery.

FWIW, I back up my home directory and data using only the 'copy' command "cp -a" to a separate drive/partition. No compression. No tar'ing, etc. Maintains the directory structure and everything. Makes it easy to replace a corrupted file with the backed up one. But for the "System," I use tar and compression.

Stef

Rsync gives you the best of both worlds... it will do exactly what your cp does, but copies only changed files, potentially dramatically speeding up backups. I backup two file systems (total around 100GB) to synchronized directories on another disk, nightly, typically in a minute or two.

jeff
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Relevant Pages

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  • Re: Partitioning a back up drive--request for comments.
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  • Re: Advise on backing up files in Etch.
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  • Re: Partitioning a back up drive--request for comments.
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