Back up solutions

[The Liquidator]

Hi folks - simple noob-style question please

Following a reformat suddenly forced on me due apparently to a corrupted partition table (still have no idea how that happened!) in which I lost some 2 weeks of data - thank God I backed up to an external hard drive just before Christmas- I have decided to formalise my backup routine.

I've chosen Back in Time. From what I can see it works incrementally on a snapshot basis and the snapshots can go back quite a long way. I guess that subsequently copies are simply taken of those files that have been later added/changed and a note is simply made of those that have been deleted, making later snapshots a mere fraction in size of the original. So, subsequent backups should be quick and, if I accidentally delete a file, but have already backed up again, I can use back in time to go to an earlier snapshot and restore it. Alternatively, if I wipe the entire system and reinstall I can simply reinstate the latest backup. Is that the general idea of what it does?

I'm just focusing on the home directory. However, in there is a Virtualbox Win XP virtual machine which, frankly, is now only likely to be used for updating a tom-tom. The VM takes up 7 Gb. Given that it's one big file I suspect that every time I run it it will constitute a change and will be backed up in full with every snapshot, so I'm thinking I should exclude it and simply copy that over periodically. That make sense?

Finally, do those who tried to help me with my recent problem think that if I had used system rescue cd and previously backed up the partition table that I would have fixed it?

Thanks

ian

[Rob_H]

Re: Back up solutions

Not sure about Back in Time, but backup systems based on rsync are able to efficiently copy only the parts of files that have changed, so your VM image would not (necessarily) be copied in its entirety every time it's touched. I use BackupPC, which is very nice. It can backup transparently over a network or locally, and uses rsync under the hood, so you get the efficiency advantage. They haven't put out a new version in a while, but the existing version does pretty much everything I want. Highly recommended.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Back up solutions

A month ago I made some backups of my pictures, movies, dev files, etc., onto a DVD and, for insurance, onto an 8GB USB stick.

I couple of days ago I needed to bring back a couple of files on that DVD. Although K3b said the burn was successful, when I browsed the DVD I noticed that second and third level subdirectories were empty. I began checking other CDs and DVDs and noticed several that had good files only on the first level. All subdirectories were empty. Thankfully, my USB sticks had everything and in good condition. I am going to make sure that my backups are on USB sticks and my portable HDs.