[clue-tech] Multiple system backups

[David L. Anselmi]

Angelo Bertolli wrote:
[...]
>> If your hardware is on, you do.  My workstation backup isn't automatic 
>> because I leave it and my USB drive off usually.  Bacula works fine 
>> for manual backups.
> 
> Maybe, but I have no idea how often I would want to do them 
> automatically.  Every week?  Every month?  I'm pretty sure I don't want 
> every day.

Why not every day?  That's where incrementals come in--less disk space 
so you can keep several backups.  Otherwise when something gets deleted 
on Monday and you realize it on Thursday you're out of luck.

[...]
>> What are your restore scenarios?  Are you using DVDs as removable 
>> storage, or are you archiving long term?
> 
> My main concern is hard drive failure.

Then you want to back up to disk, DVDs are irrelevant.

[...]
> What I really want is to be able to every so often make a snapshot of 
> what I have, just in case something bad happens.   And because I'm only
> concerned with the latest snapshot, I don't want to be burning it to DVD 
> all the time--just once in a while.  I'm hoping the scenario will be 
> that I never have to go back to a DVD, that I can just restore off the 
> backup drive--but having a DVD makes me feel safer.

My experience is that your DVD will usually be old enough that it 
doesn't help much.

[...]
> Yeah, that's sort of where I'm at now.  Also, I have a hard time 
> identifying what is important to back up and what is not.

Probably these: /etc, /home, anything in /usr/local, /srv, or /opt you 
may care about.  Perhaps /boot if you have grub configs in there. 
Depending on your system you might also want /var.  Debian stores CVS 
repositories and apache's doc root there.

You might try rdiff-backup, it sounds like a decent approach to disk to 
disk backups.  If you still think you need DVDs you can probably find 
software to split the rdiff tree over multiple DVDs.

Dave
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