[Discuss] Possible backup scenarios for a 500GB drive

[John Blomfield]

Alan W. Irwin wrote
>>  
> 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
I can understand why dump/ restore can be attractive to you and I am not 
familiar with RIP usage but does it also allow you to restore individual 
files or directories? The reason I ask is that I have had trouble when 
upgrading my distro's versions (Fedora). If you choose upgrade instead 
of a new clean install a lot of you're old setting which are only 
relevant to the old version are preserved.  This applies mainly to the 
packages you happen to be using.  For example when I tried to upgrade 
from Fedora 5 to 6, I could not get KDE to work because the old version 
settings were being still used and I could not track down which 
configuration files needed to be upgrade and what they should be! In the 
end had to do a clean new install of Fedora 6.  I now backup just /home/ 
and /etc/ separately and restore just the stuff that is needed. I plan 
to partition my drives to simplify this process the next time I try a 
new distro version and have a separate partition and directory for 
applications that are not included in the distro or that I write 
myself.  If I had a drive failure it would take me longer to do a full 
restore because I would have to re-install the basic distro but when it 
comes to upgrading versions I know I can make everything work as before.

John Blomfield

> __________________________
> 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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