Backup

[Matt Graham]

From: "Eric - A" <ericallen3 at juno.com>
> What is a simple program to do full and incremental backups of my
> hard drive? I'm running Ubuntu 10.04.

I wouldn't back up the whole disk, just because Linux and most of the apps on
it are relatively easy and quick to reinstall.  I plug a USB2 drive in, mount
it on /mnt/backup/ , then use "rsync -a --delete-after /home/mhgraham/
/mnt/backup/" every few days.[0]  I rotate those disks so I've always got one
at home and another offsite in a reasonably secure place.  My ~ contains all
the data that'd be annoying, difficult, or impossible to replace.  I can
recreate the config files in /etc without much pain.  Initial sync on each
disk took over an hour.  Incremental syncs take 3-4 minutes.

Note that YMMV, and you should change your backup plan if you've got more
complicated stuff going on, or commercial apps that require license keys, or
junk like that.  But if you can install a distro, the bootloader and
executables are much much easier to recover in case of disk failure than your
collection of financial data, your Great American Novel first draft, or all
your custom Perl scripts.

I've had reasonable luck using partimage to back up and restore a partition
containing 'DozeXP.  I had to manually gunzip the image files it created
before the restore would work, though, and I hope they've fixed that problem
in the latest release.

[0] It's a little bit more complex than that, but it's all in 2 bash scripts
that both fit on one screen, and that rsync is the main thing that can't be
eliminated.

-- 
Matt G / Dances With Crows
The Crow202 Blog:  http://crow202.org/wordpress/
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see