backup with rsync

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

On Thu, 31 Jul 2003 10:24:13 -0400
Dan Barrett <nullpointer at pobox.com> wrote:

> I'm thinking of adding another disk to my box and backing the laptop
> up nightly to that disk.  I'll burn a CD of the disk once a 
> week/month/quarter/whatever.
> I was going to stay away from tape drives -- it seems to me that there
> are no more consumer-grade (i.e. decent quality, but affordable) tape
> drives out there because hard disk space is so cheap now.
I backup my /home file system every night to a separate disk using tar.
I backup my wife's Windows system using rsync. I use an exclude file to
prevent saving cache, temp, swap and other junk files. I use the u flag
to prevent from copying older files. It works well. The one caveat is
that the remote system could go to sleep. I was not able to set
wake-on-lan on my wife's system. 

If you can locate a good quality commercial tape unit it might be a good
investment, but the chances of having both you primary and backup drive
failing simultaneously is somewhat low. 

WRT: Consumer grade tape units. A total waste of money. I used to
periodically back up my system onto one of the consumer drives. The
first time I needed to restore the tape broke. I tried the previous tape
and it broke. Luckily, at that time I had bought a Jaz drive, and had
done a backup to that. I have many war stories I can recite using
commercial 9 track systems also. I've even had drives burn a hole in a
backup tape. 
-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9
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