I posted about this and received no replies. I thought I'd report back about what I wound up doing...
> I have a spare 1 GB disk at work which I could use to backup my /home > partition (which consists of 1 GB amidst a 4.3 GB disk). > > (If I decide I can tolerate the 1GB-disk's whining; it's surprising how > annoying the sound of the old disk is compared to my new Seagate > Barracuda.) I'm using scsi-idle to spin the disk down when not needed, so I don't hear it at all since the backups run at night! > I'm accustomed to using tar. I thought I'd learn about incremental tar > archives and: > > o erase the disk every Friday evening and make a new tar file > on the disk. > o create an incremental tar file from Monday to Thursday evenings. > > Is this wise? Or should I use dump/restore which I know nothing about? I decided to go with a known quantity and use tar. > Part of the protection I want is from myself: > If I accidentally delete a file on Monday and it takes me until > Thursday to realise that, I'd like the file to still exist on the backup. I added a few /etc/crontab entries to run at 2 AM: 00 2 * * 6 root /root/backup-weekly 00 2 * * 2 root /root/backup-weekdays 1-tuesday 00 2 * * 3 root /root/backup-weekdays 2-wednesday 00 2 * * 4 root /root/backup-weekdays 3-thurday 00 2 * * 5 root /root/backup-weekdays 4-friday and created simple scripts that run at night and email me results: /root/backup-weekly: #! /bin/sh # Weekly backup mount -t ext2 /dev/sdb2 /backup rm -f /backup/weekly/* /usr/bin/dpkg --get-selections > /backup/weekly/debian.selections tar -c -f /backup/weekly/etc.tar /etc 1> /dev/null 2> /dev/null tar -c -f /backup/weekly/root.tar /root 1> /dev/null 2> /dev/null tar -c -f /backup/weekly/home.tar -g /backup/weekly/home.snapshot /home/ 1> /dev/null 2> /dev/null df /dev/sdb2 | mail rhogee umount /backup /root/backup-weekdays: #! /bin/sh # Weekday backup job -- Monday -> Thurdsy # Usage: backup-weekday 1-monday # mount -t ext2 /dev/sdb2 /backup tar -cvf /backup/weekly/home-$1.tar -g /backup/weekly/home.snapshot /home/ 1> /tmp/backup-log 2> /tmp/backup-errors if ( test -f /tmp/backup-log ) then mail -s "backup log -- `date`" rhogee < /tmp/backup-log else echo "No backup log file!" | mail rhogee fi; if ( test -f /tmp/backup-errors ) then mail -s "backup errors ! -- `date`" rhogee < /tmp/backup-errors fi; df /dev/sdb2 | mail rhogee umount /backup My backup partition looks like this today: bash-2.00# ls -l /backup/weekly/ total 576964 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6210 Aug 9 02:00 debian.selections -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1832960 Aug 9 02:00 etc.tar -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9134080 Aug 12 02:01 home-1-tuesday.tar -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 47842 Aug 12 02:01 home.snapshot -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 575283200 Aug 9 02:06 home.tar -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2191360 Aug 9 02:00 root.tar Pretty cool! -- Peter Galbraith, research scientist <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Maurice-Lamontagne Institute, Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada P.O. Box 1000, Mont-Joli Qc, G5H 3Z4 Canada 418-775-0852 - FAX 418-775-0546 -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .