[clue-tech] More questions on backups, auto backups and mounting

[Adrian F. Nagle, IV]

Folks,

So while my first rsync is chugging on 300Gb of stuff, I'm looking ahead on how to do this automatically.

Some basic questions first:
* I'm backing up one USB external drive to another external USB drive.  I prefer that the backup USB drive not be powered, therefore I think it needs to be unmounted.  Is this true?  The USB drive is a Seagate.  I'm thinking of drive life.  Would a cron job be able to mount and unmount for a backup process?

* How does rsync work with incremental backups?  It appears as if you always use the same desitnation for rsync, so that it checks if the destiation and source are the same.  Is this a valid backup approach?  I'm wondering if I need a thrid drive to "protect" a backup copy as another backup occurs.  Data wise, much of it is music that does not change and I can theoretically re-rip everything.  The datafiles obivously are more changing and can't be recreated.

Thank you!

Adrian
-- 
Adrian Nagle ~ anagle at naglenet.org ~ http://www.naglenet.org/