[Discuss] Possible backup scenarios for a 500GB drive

[John Blomfield]

My first thought is that you need a system that has a BIOS that will 
boot from a USB if you have nothing on your Hard Drive.  I think such a 
thing might exist now??? Otherwise, you just have to boot your system 
with a CD containing a Linux recovery system of a Linux Live CD then you 
can access your USB hard drive.  For example my Fedora 6 Rescue CD once 
it is booted and running allows you to transfer to any other partition 
or drive that may contain another Linux installation.

Incidentally, if you are buying a new system, if this is a desktop (mini 
tower) not a laptop, why not just add a second internal hard drive for 
backup?  It will be much faster to backup to that than to an external 
USB drive.  USB data transfer is quite slow compared to an internal SATA 
drive.

John Blomfield

Alan W. Irwin wrote:
> I am just in the middle of purchasing a new system with a 500GB internal
> hard drive, and I have heard that a good way to back up large internal
> drives is with a large external hard drive. Such external hard drives are
> relatively cheap these days (~$150 for a USB 2.0 500GB external hard 
> drive
> at atic.ca). One backup scenario I am thinking of is to periodically 
> plug in
> a USB external hard drive and run rsync to clone everything under / on 
> the
> internal drive to the external one.  Would that allow me to boot from
> the external hard drive as a temporary measure if the internal hard drive
> failed, and it was taking a while to replace it?
>
> Another backup procedure which I know would work would be to use
> dump/restore from a rescue distro such as RIP.  (I used that method in 
> the
> past to restore the club shuttles to a known state after they were loaned
> out to club members for talks.) However, that method would not allow 
> me to
> boot during the time when the internal hard drive was being replaced, and
> I am wondering if the rsync method would actually allow that?
>
> Alan
> __________________________
> Alan W. Irwin
>
> Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and 
> Astronomy,
> University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).
>
> Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state 
> implementation
> for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting 
> software
> package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the 
> Loads of
> Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
> (lbproject.sf.net).
> __________________________
>
> Linux-powered Science
> __________________________
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