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On 17/06/11 11:52, Neil Winchurst wrote:
There are several file storage systems out there, to keep your important files safe and as backup. Some of them have some free space to start you off and then charge, others charge from the start. Examples are dropbox, spideroak, box.net, mozy and adrive. There are lots of others.Now I don't have that many files that I care about so what I do is copy those to my website to a folder set up for the purpose. This is for files other than photos. As the latter can be quite large I use k3b to store my photos on to a DVD.So my question is, am I missing something here? Do I really need to use one of these special programs? (OK. That's two questions.)Anyone? Neil
For Me .....A good external USB Drive (x2 if you want redundancy) + good old fashioned tar command from the command line. I don't like the idea of 3rd party "cloud" storage. I like my data where I have total control. If you are worried about fire / physical damage keep one USB drive off site (a good use for relatives). It might not be the most convenient solution but it has its merits. If your data requirements are small enough a usb pen drive might do the trick.
Backup your home directory(s) in its entirety and you should have all your configs for the desktop apps etc. Not much point in backing up anything other than /home (and possibly /etc) unless you have databases, in which case a quick mysqldump script to somewhere on your home drive would get picked up on the next backup of /home. Recovering programs on linux distros are mostly an apt-get install or yum --install away (depending on your distro of choice). If the worst really does happen and you need to rebuild the entire machine .... well think of it as an exercise (this is where having a backup of /etc comes in handy to recover password and group files etc.). The rest is noise.
Certain simplistic attitude to desktop configuration can save a lot of time. I don't tend to spend ages re-configuring my desktop. Mostly because Im a lazy sod, partly because the closer my machine is to its original defaults the easier it would be to recover and the less surprises when the worst does happen.
Server backups need more consideration depending on the nature of the data you need to secure, but the principals are the same. I would try not to get bogged down in "look no hands" solutions. This is why I like tar its simple it backs up a set of file and it restores a set of files, you are in total control of what you backup and what you restore. Yes I know there are people out there who will say "what about incremental backups" but with storage so cheap these days and the fact you can compress backups on the fly with tar (like many more sophisticated tools) is it really that necessary to setup incremental backups?
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