I am a fairly simple Magazine reader so I never understood all those fancy backup solutions out there. Mandriva had some crappy daemons and drakbackup does fill up your HD to the point where Linux gets unresponsive. So I had a look at Bacula - Yeah right I went for a Whiskey after 10 minutes and dropped it. (It seems to be a great tool so it is me being unfair and impatient here). And even If I understood how to operate different backup programs I never fully understood how they operated. To the point that I did not know where to look for files for restoring. And I see all those competent experts out there talking about backups and I get the impression they do it every day with ease and total control. That leaves sloppy me! | Well actually I have found a way that I can control: I copy my home directory to an external USB Harddisk (My Book) and I know it works because I have restored it when necessary. So that works - kind of. And should disaster strike I can always reinstall the distro and All the programs and create my User (puh..) restore the home directory and all is back. It can be done a lot easier than that you say? Yes it can, and I will not be knowing what I am doing - and I hate that. But back to the simple aproach and this is where you gurus can be really useful: I want this thread to end with a script or program that we have made here (OK I can do all the scripting but I prefer not to). So what do we need to back up to make a sensible restore when disaster strikes? (Not all of it! Reinstalling the distro is fine). What media to use? Can we use dropbox How can we make use of cron jobs? Network solutions -ssh? Anything else? |
SInce Berserks are brutal and undemocratic I'll start and dictate that we must make use of rsync. I have not made a script I just write this line every time:
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rsync --delete -azvv -e /home/thomas /media/My?Book/thomas-pc_backup
This backs up my entire home directory (thomas) to the attached My Book in a folder I have named thomas-pc_backup.
It works fine I can put back whatever I want from it. This is useful when I have destroyed Virtual box installations etc.
When I have My Book attached to to my server I make use of ssh:
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rsync --delete -azvv -e ssh /home/thomas thomas@viking60-server:/media/My?Book/thomas-pc_backup
And start it from the same box. The only differense is that the My Book is attached to the server.
That works fine to. Can we think of a solution with dropbox here?
As you can see I need to automate this stuff in a script and I thought I'll add some fancy stuff that you have helped me with.
What other areas should be backed up? Lets start there.
The stage is yours
PS if you want to go directly to the succesfull conclusion (pt) you can go here
Or you can download it from github
You will find the wiki here