[Discuss] Possible backup scenarios for a 500GB drive

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2007-10-25 11:53-0800 David Frey wrote:

> I'm a bit late getting in on this discussion, but I have a few comments.
>
> Incremental backups are good because you may not know that you have
> accidentally deleted something before your next backup runs.  If you are
> cloning then your data is gone.
>
> If you are getting a 500GB drive for your computer, get a 750GB or 1TB
> drive for incremental backup unless you think there will be a large
> portion of the data on the main disk that you can do without backing up.

I agree.  However, my current disk usage is something like 30GB so first I
am going to use the 80GB internal on the old shuttle for backups then move
to 500GB external when needed, then probably add another 500GB external
after that when needed for backup.  Also, I have pretty much settled on
using dump/restore since (a) that is what I am used to, and (b) there is a
gzip compression option with it that typically (for my file mix which tends
to have a lot of easily compressed files mixed in with the incompressible
ones) gains me an overall factor of two reduction in backup file size
compared to the original size of the files being backed up.

Some other poster mentioned that a backup is not a backup until you confirm
it actually has usable data on it.  I agree.  For dump/restore there is a
restore verify option that automatically checks that all original files can
be resurrected with exact bits, ownerships, times, and permissions from the
(compressed) data produced by dump.  I use that verify option as an automatic
part of the dump/restore script that I wrote which gives a lot of peace of
mind.

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).
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