backup using USB hard drive

[Harold Hallikainen]

> I guess the big questions would involve:
>
> 1) how much data we are talking about, and
>

Right now the whole system is about 40 gigs.

> 2) whether you would rather copy/restore the whole *&() drive each time,
or  if it is a once-a-year sort of thing.  I work with a systems admin
who ghosts everything, all the time, every day.  It is a little too much
of a crutch in his case, but that is differrent.

I'm currently generating a tar of each directory (as below) once a week.
This involves no down time. If I use Norton Ghost to make a backup, the
system will be down during the backup. Using dd, it would not, but I might
have problems with stuff changing during the backup. Not sure how much of
a problem that is.

>>>I'm tarring each directory off root (/var, /etc, /home, ...).
>
> Curious, why are you doing this?  Your data will only likely be in a few
directories (/home and whatever other few directories you put apps in or
whatever).  If you partition well, you can set it up so that you could,
in the event of failure or running out of disk space --
> recreate a new partition on the fly with fdisk or something similar. A
lot of those directories aren't going anywhere, and even if they did,
they would reappear exactly the same.  IOW, you can partition with the
full understanding that if there is ever a problem, you could do a
restore/partial install and fix the thing.  All the while your *real*
data is on another parttion.  Linux's fdisk is smart enough to give you
the option of what to keep and what to blow away at
> install/repair time.
>

I'm tarring everything because I don't really know where aps hide
everything (code, config files, etc.). So, I'm just making sure. The drive
I'm backing up to is 120 gigs, and I have two of them that I swap between.

>
>>>Luckily, I have not had to restore from a backup yet. I'd like to do
> a "bare metal" backup so I can restore everything, including boot code,
in one restore operation. I'm considering
> doing it with Norton Ghost, but would dd be able to do it?
>
> DD will do a bit-by-bit copy of anything anywhere (floppy, hard drive
etc) to anywhere else in a *nix environment.  Keep in mind that while it
is a powerful command, it is still only a command -- not a full fledged
backup utility.  Even small hard drives add up to a lot of bits,
especially when you are copying it in a linear fashion!
>
> Nonetheless you could try
>
> # dd if=/ of=/dev/hdd                       (assuming d is your target
location drive)
>
> I would be curious to know how long it takes to do a decent sized drive.
 With a really big drive it might take awhile however - a pretty serious
drawback if you are going to be doing this really often.
>
>>>Any other suggestions?
>
> After you have determined the true amount of data that you need to
backup, you might consider burning cd's of certain directories.
> Consider it a 'snapshot' of ongoing data, write a date on the disk and
forget about it.  If you need to do a restore, just throw in the cd and
mount it and copy whatever you need.  This way you seperate your
operating system files from your data.
>

Thanks for the comments! I'll try to find the time to give some of this a
try!

Harold


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