> On Fri, 17 Aug 2012 03:40:41 -0500, Emil Payne wrote:
>
>> I have a 1 TB external USB drive with 362 GB used. I'd like to do a full
>> backup to DVDs and then an incremental (or something) backup every month
>> or two, also to DVDs or CDs. I'd like the backups to be compressed in
>> order to save space (i.e. - the number of DVDs/CDs used).
>
> Optical media storage is a PITA for big amounts of data (it's very slow
> and hard to manage when you intend to do rewrite operations).
I really hate to be the old fogey here, but if you've got the $$, tape
sure does a good job. Use Amanda for both incrementals and fulls, and to
reduce PITA, get cron to run them overnight. Or over the weekend, if you
want to backup a lot of data, but infrequently.
Optical disks and hard disks don't last. I have audio tapes from the 1950s
that are still good. Tape has its disadvantages, but longevity isn't one
of them...
For backup, though, I'd suggest springing a little more media and telling
Amanda to write uncompressed tarballs -- for reliability and ease of recovery
from a major disaster. You can recover from an Amanda backup tape with nothing
more than plain old tar. A major PITA, but it's possible.
--
Glenn English
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08-17-2012, 07:55 PM
Gary Dale
Backup
On 17/08/12 10:07 AM, Emil Payne wrote:
On 08/17/2012 04:20 AM, Gary Dale wrote:
On 17/08/12 04:40 AM, Emil Payne wrote:
I have a 1 TB external USB drive with 362 GB used. I'd like to do a
full backup to DVDs and then an incremental (or something) backup
every month or two, also to DVDs or CDs. I'd like the backups to be
compressed in order to save space (i.e. - the number of DVDs/CDs
used). What is a good program to do this with? Or, what is a good
step of different programs to do this with? I'm a home user with
decent knowledge of Debian/Linux, but not a shell programmer.
Depending on your data, compression may or may not be useful. Video
and audio data is usually already optimally compressed.
4.5G on a DVD is also not terribly useful if you want to back up
large amounts of data. BluRay writers are cheap enough these days,
and BD-RE discs are not too expensive. BD-R discs are even cheaper
for doing an archival backup.
You don't say what you are backing up. If it is the data on the
external drive, you may want to consider getting a second drive and
backing up to that. It's a lot easier than manually swapping discs.
In this case, you could try Bacula. It's not too difficult to set up
and quite flexible.
All the folders in my home folder (except "desktop") is a link to a
folder on the backup drive. These are: Backups, Documents, Downloads,
Favorites, Memos, Music, MyPDA, Pictures, Programs, Projects, Public,
Temp, Templates, Themes, Utilities & Videos. Also, I have the entire
filesystem for this computer and for a separate Windows 7 computer
copied in tar.gz format. (I connect the drive directly to the Windows
box via the usb cable to do that.) There is also a separate "Backup"
folder on the backup drive where I have a couple of programs running
backups /home, /opt & /var and where I also back up cells phones for
friends and relatives (8 at the moment) and things like my camera and
Palm PDA SD cards.
(Speaking of tar.gz; what is a good format for compression for this
varied type of info? I've access to about 20 different formats on this
box.)
This is the type of stuff I want to make a safe backup of. I've
already lost all the info on the drive once several months back when
someone defragged it when it was hooked up to the windows box. I have
a ton of old CDs collected from about 10 years of use that I was able
to (with a lot of pain and work) get quite a bit of data back from.
The suggestion of a blue ray drive and disk or a secondary drive sound
like a good one.
Any other suggestions for things I haven't thought of?
Whether or not optical is a PITA depends on how much data you have to
back up. If it fits onto a single disc, it's great. Otherwise you may
want to look at other options. BluRay can hold 24G - 45G depending on
the number of layers.
I haven't seen BD-RE in double layer yet, so assume 24G for now. For me,
that's more than sufficient to back up all my work in a year. BD-RE is
good for a long time, depending on usage, and is simple to use.
I prefer lzma compression for tars. It's a bit slower than some, but
gives really good compression.
Never rely on a single backup. I keep multiple archives of old work on
optical discs, in addition to a live copy and a live backup copy on a
separate file system on the same RAID5 array. That's actually not all
that safe (the RAID array could fail), but the live backup copy is
mainly used if I accidentally delete the wrong file.
I don't recommend backing up entire file systems very often. It's your
data, not the programs, that are critical. You may also want to back up
/etc since it contains your system settings and is highly compressible.
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On 17/08/12 10:40, Emil Payne wrote:
> I have a 1 TB external USB drive with 362 GB used. I'd like to do a full
> backup to DVDs and then an incremental (or something) backup every month
> or two, also to DVDs or CDs. I'd like the backups to be compressed in
> order to save space (i.e. - the number of DVDs/CDs used). What is a
> good program to do this with? Or, what is a good step of different
> programs to do this with? I'm a home user with decent knowledge of
> Debian/Linux, but not a shell programmer.
FWIW, I gave up backing up to DVD when my data reached about 1/10 of the
size of yours. Too slow, too cumbersome (having to change disks), too
unreliable, to expensive etc.
I suggest to buy one or better two other 1TB usb disks and backup to
them (alternately). You don't need to be a shell programmer, a simple
$ rsync -av /path/to/disk /path/to/backup
followed by
$ cp -al /path/to/backup /path/to/backup-nnnn
where nnnn could be a number or a date, should be more efficient (and
cheaper in the long run) than a pile of optical disks.
Occasionally, you could use rsync's -c option to verify that your backup
is ok.
(/path/to/disk is the mount point of your existing disk; /path/to/backup
is mountpoint and path of your backup disk)
My 2ct,
Johannes
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08-17-2012, 10:41 PM
Gary Dale
Backup
On 17/08/12 02:25 PM, Glenn English wrote:
On Aug 17, 2012, at 10:53 AM, Camaleón wrote:
On Fri, 17 Aug 2012 03:40:41 -0500, Emil Payne wrote:
I have a 1 TB external USB drive with 362 GB used. I'd like to do a full
backup to DVDs and then an incremental (or something) backup every month
or two, also to DVDs or CDs. I'd like the backups to be compressed in
order to save space (i.e. - the number of DVDs/CDs used).
Optical media storage is a PITA for big amounts of data (it's very slow
and hard to manage when you intend to do rewrite operations).
I really hate to be the old fogey here, but if you've got the $$, tape
sure does a good job. Use Amanda for both incrementals and fulls, and to
reduce PITA, get cron to run them overnight. Or over the weekend, if you
want to backup a lot of data, but infrequently.
Optical disks and hard disks don't last. I have audio tapes from the 1950s
that are still good. Tape has its disadvantages, but longevity isn't one
of them...
For backup, though, I'd suggest springing a little more media and telling
Amanda to write uncompressed tarballs -- for reliability and ease of recovery
from a major disaster. You can recover from an Amanda backup tape with nothing
more than plain old tar. A major PITA, but it's possible.
While tape has uses, it's not all that reliable. Tape is subject to
chemical deterioration, magnetic drop-outs, stretching, and a host of
other problems. You won't notice the problems so much on audio tape with
a lot of tape surface to hold the music (1/2 inch open reel audio tapes
from the 1950s are more reliable than cassettes from the 1970s).
However, on data tapes, the problems start showing up fairly quickly.
It's main advantage over the years has been capacity. A automatic tape
library can hold a lot of data over multiple tapes. However, tape
changers are expensive, as are the media.
You're correct about not compressing the data. Uncompressed tars are
less prone to catastrophic failure from data dropouts. However, this is
less of an issue with optical media. Still, I always do a cmp after
backing up to optical media just to ensure the data actually copied
correctly. If it didn't, I rsync and cmp again.
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> On 17/08/12 02:25 PM, Glenn English wrote:
>> On Aug 17, 2012, at 10:53 AM, Camaleón wrote:
>>
>>> On Fri, 17 Aug 2012 03:40:41 -0500, Emil Payne wrote:
>>>
>>>> I have a 1 TB external USB drive with 362 GB used. I'd like to do a
>>>> full
>>>> backup to DVDs and then an incremental (or something) backup every
>>>> month
>>>> or two, also to DVDs or CDs. I'd like the backups to be compressed in
>>>> order to save space (i.e. - the number of DVDs/CDs used).
>>> Optical media storage is a PITA for big amounts of data (it's very slow
>>> and hard to manage when you intend to do rewrite operations).
>> I really hate to be the old fogey here, but if you've got the $$, tape
>> sure does a good job. Use Amanda for both incrementals and fulls, and to
>> reduce PITA, get cron to run them overnight. Or over the weekend, if you
>> want to backup a lot of data, but infrequently.
>>
>> Optical disks and hard disks don't last. I have audio tapes from the
>> 1950s
>> that are still good. Tape has its disadvantages, but longevity isn't one
>> of them...
>>
>> For backup, though, I'd suggest springing a little more media and telling
>> Amanda to write uncompressed tarballs -- for reliability and ease of
>> recovery
>> from a major disaster. You can recover from an Amanda backup tape with
>> nothing
>> more than plain old tar. A major PITA, but it's possible.
>
> While tape has uses, it's not all that reliable. Tape is subject to
> chemical deterioration, magnetic drop-outs, stretching, and a host of
> other problems. You won't notice the problems so much on audio tape with
> a lot of tape surface to hold the music (1/2 inch open reel audio tapes
> from the 1950s are more reliable than cassettes from the 1970s).
> However, on data tapes, the problems start showing up fairly quickly.
>
> It's main advantage over the years has been capacity. A automatic tape
> library can hold a lot of data over multiple tapes. However, tape
> changers are expensive, as are the media.
>
> You're correct about not compressing the data. Uncompressed tars are
> less prone to catastrophic failure from data dropouts. However, this is
> less of an issue with optical media. Still, I always do a cmp after
> backing up to optical media just to ensure the data actually copied
> correctly. If it didn't, I rsync and cmp again.
If you were to forgo tape as an option, I could recommend luckybackup
(it's in the current Squeeze repos).
I stumbled across it after I found when upgrading to Fedora 17,
mondoarchive no longer worked so that left me looking for something else
to use for local backups (I use rsync for remote ones) on Fedora.
It's basically a frontend for rsync that does incremental backups,
snapshots, etc & it really is more than adequate. I've checked the
restore function & that worked fine, so all in all it does the job that
I ask of it very well. YMMV.
Cheers,
Phil...
--
currently (ab)using
CentOS 6.3, Debian Squeeze, Fedora Beefy, OS X Snow Leopard, Ubuntu Precise
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08-18-2012, 06:01 PM
Camaleón
Backup
On Fri, 17 Aug 2012 12:25:58 -0600, Glenn English wrote:
> On Aug 17, 2012, at 10:53 AM, Camaleón wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 17 Aug 2012 03:40:41 -0500, Emil Payne wrote:
>>
>>> I have a 1 TB external USB drive with 362 GB used. I'd like to do a
>>> full backup to DVDs and then an incremental (or something) backup
>>> every month or two, also to DVDs or CDs. I'd like the backups to be
>>> compressed in order to save space (i.e. - the number of DVDs/CDs
>>> used).
>>
>> Optical media storage is a PITA for big amounts of data (it's very slow
>> and hard to manage when you intend to do rewrite operations).
>
> I really hate to be the old fogey here, but if you've got the $$, tape
> sure does a good job. Use Amanda for both incrementals and fulls, and to
> reduce PITA, get cron to run them overnight. Or over the weekend, if you
> want to backup a lot of data, but infrequently.
(...)
I see two key problems for that suggestion:
1/ In addition to the cost, tapes are not aimed to plain users.
2/ Using Amanda for a single machine is like using a hammer to crack a
nut.
A backup solution has to be easier and accessible enough for users to use
it flawlessly, otherwise backup copies won't be never done ;-)
Greetings,
--
Camaleón
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08-18-2012, 09:25 PM
Gary Dale
Backup
On 17/08/12 03:55 PM, Gary Dale wrote:
On 17/08/12 10:07 AM, Emil Payne wrote:
On 08/17/2012 04:20 AM, Gary Dale wrote:
On 17/08/12 04:40 AM, Emil Payne wrote:
I have a 1 TB external USB drive with 362 GB used. I'd like to do a
full backup to DVDs and then an incremental (or something) backup
every month or two, also to DVDs or CDs. I'd like the backups to be
compressed in order to save space (i.e. - the number of DVDs/CDs
used). What is a good program to do this with? Or, what is a good
step of different programs to do this with? I'm a home user with
decent knowledge of Debian/Linux, but not a shell programmer.
Depending on your data, compression may or may not be useful. Video
and audio data is usually already optimally compressed.
4.5G on a DVD is also not terribly useful if you want to back up
large amounts of data. BluRay writers are cheap enough these days,
and BD-RE discs are not too expensive. BD-R discs are even cheaper
for doing an archival backup.
You don't say what you are backing up. If it is the data on the
external drive, you may want to consider getting a second drive and
backing up to that. It's a lot easier than manually swapping discs.
In this case, you could try Bacula. It's not too difficult to set up
and quite flexible.
All the folders in my home folder (except "desktop") is a link to a
folder on the backup drive. These are: Backups, Documents,
Downloads, Favorites, Memos, Music, MyPDA, Pictures, Programs,
Projects, Public, Temp, Templates, Themes, Utilities & Videos. Also,
I have the entire filesystem for this computer and for a separate
Windows 7 computer copied in tar.gz format. (I connect the drive
directly to the Windows box via the usb cable to do that.) There is
also a separate "Backup" folder on the backup drive where I have a
couple of programs running backups /home, /opt & /var and where I
also back up cells phones for friends and relatives (8 at the moment)
and things like my camera and Palm PDA SD cards.
(Speaking of tar.gz; what is a good format for compression for this
varied type of info? I've access to about 20 different formats on
this box.)
This is the type of stuff I want to make a safe backup of. I've
already lost all the info on the drive once several months back when
someone defragged it when it was hooked up to the windows box. I have
a ton of old CDs collected from about 10 years of use that I was able
to (with a lot of pain and work) get quite a bit of data back from.
The suggestion of a blue ray drive and disk or a secondary drive
sound like a good one.
Any other suggestions for things I haven't thought of?
Whether or not optical is a PITA depends on how much data you have to
back up. If it fits onto a single disc, it's great. Otherwise you may
want to look at other options. BluRay can hold 24G - 45G depending on
the number of layers.
I haven't seen BD-RE in double layer yet, so assume 24G for now. For
me, that's more than sufficient to back up all my work in a year.
BD-RE is good for a long time, depending on usage, and is simple to use.
I prefer lzma compression for tars. It's a bit slower than some, but
gives really good compression.
Never rely on a single backup. I keep multiple archives of old work on
optical discs, in addition to a live copy and a live backup copy on a
separate file system on the same RAID5 array. That's actually not all
that safe (the RAID array could fail), but the live backup copy is
mainly used if I accidentally delete the wrong file.
I don't recommend backing up entire file systems very often. It's your
data, not the programs, that are critical. You may also want to back
up /etc since it contains your system settings and is highly
compressible.
Just found BD-RE DL in a local store - priced at about 3 - 4 times what
a single layer BD-RE costs. Still, not bad if you need the space for a
backup.
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Backup
