Hard disks

[david at thekramers.net (David Kramer)]

On Fri, 19 Apr 2002, Drew Taylor wrote:

> At 03:31 PM 4/19/02 -0400, David Kramer wrote:
> 
> >Burning CD's sometimes fails, but at least you know right away .  That's
> >what I back up to.  My backup scripts create iso files that I burn at
> >will.
> 
> Excellent idea! Now if I can just get a CD burner in my linux box, I can do 
> the same thing and automate it too. I really need a backup plan, since my 
> non-existent plan is sure to bite me in the butt one day.

I've talked about my backup script at meetings, but in essence what I do 
is build a directory tree filled with symbolic links to the files I want 
to back up (so the staging of the backup takes up almost no space), and 
then mkisofs on that directory.

I back up /home, /var/spool, Apache's document roots, and (here's the 
interesting one) all text files less than 40K.  By text file, I mean 
[ -T $File ] is true in Perl.  That will get you pretty much every single 
config file.  Who cares about backing up the rest of the OS?  Reinstall 
and restore your config files.

So far it all fits on one CD, but when it doesn't I'll just break the
apache stuff into a seperate ISO file.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
DDDD   David Kramer         david at thekramers.net       http://thekramers.net
DK KD  "Always listen to the experts. 
DKK D  They'll tell you what can't be done and why.
DK KD  Then do it."
DDDD                                                         Robert Heinlein