Stoopid but pressing backup question

[Les Mikesell]

Dean S. Messing wrote:
> craigni wrote:
> <snip
> : I'm getting enamored of rsync to the point where I think that's the
> : backup strategy I'd like to use
> <snip>
> 
> Since you are interested in using rsync for backups, you might profit
> by having a look at "rnsapshot" which uses rsync at its heart but with
> a nice way to configure what and how often you want to backed up.
> 
> <http://www.rsnapshot.org/>
> 
> An alternative to this is another rsync-based backup system:
> 
> <http://edseek.com/~jasonb/articles/dirvish_backup/introduction.html>
> 
> These both use the hardlink facilities of rsync to only backup what's
> changed, yet keep your entire directory structure intact for each
> backup (by using multiple hard links to the same data).

Or if you have more than one machine to back up, backuppc 
(http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/) will compress and
hardlink all files with identical content whether from the same source 
or not.

I think the OP was looking for an easy way to do a complete restore, 
though.  One of the easiest would be to download the bootable iso for 
clonezilla live (http://clonezilla.sourceforge.net/clonezilla-live) 
which will save compressed disk/partition images to local/nfs/smb/ssh 
locations and knows enough about linux and ntfs filesystems to only save 
the used portions. On restore, it will re-create the partions, copy back 
the contents and make the disk bootable for you.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com