[olug] Backups??

[Daniel Linder]

On Mon, February 27, 2006 08:55, Don Kauffman wrote:

> First of all, I'd like to do an informal poll and find out what
people

> are using to back up their personal data with Linux. I figure this
will

> be of interest to others as well.



I have both a DVD burner and external USB HDD enclosuer at my
disposal.  The DVD writer is nice now that media prices have fallen
enough in the past two years to make the occasional coaster a
non-issue.  My only beef with it is that most backup tools I've
played with don't handle spanning multiple DVDs.  



My external HDD (USB attached, 80GB) is ear-marked to be a backup device
between both mine and my wifes computers.  I just gotta get into the
habit of plugging it in and doing it.



Of the two, I really like the USB HDD method -- the speed nice, and I
don't have to continually flip in a blank DVD.  (My home dir with
music and big work files is about 60GB.)



> Secondly, I'd like to know if anyone has experience using the USB
Hard

> drives as backups to their Linux data and what that experience has
been.

> I'd like to know what you had to do to get it working.



Thankfully with Ubuntu, my experience has been that "it just
works" (tm).  Between Gnome or KDE (Kubuntu), the drive showed
up as a volume on the desktop.  I ended up writing a script using
"rsync" to do a manual backup, but I'd like to find something
else since rsync is really meant for having two machines on opposite ends
of the read/write stream.



> Thirdly, I've toyed with the idea of getting an older machine and

> putting a larger hard drive in it to serve as a backup but that
seems

> kind of iffy. Has anyone done that?



That's my ultimate goal.  A few years ago I had played with
"Amanda" as a backup server, but the Windows client wasn't there
yet (or at least didn't work for me).  I'm sure it's matured more
since.  For Windows or Linux clients, you could look at a simple NFS
share that the clients can map to and schedule a system backup to that
drive letter.  I believe the Microsoft "Services For Unix"
are free for download.  If not, you could setup Samba on that server
and use that for the Windows systems.



The rsync home page lists some extensive scripts that people have written
to create a set of rotating backups using rsync to a (?NFS/SAMBA?)
server.  Since rsync has both Unix and Windows versions, you might
want to check this URL:

http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/



Dan



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