On Thu, Mar 01, 2001 at 10:35:23PM -0900, Ethan Benson wrote: > On Fri, Mar 02, 2001 at 07:29:21AM +0000, Matthew Sackman wrote: > > > > > > /usr/bin/yes make backups\!\!\! > > > > I'm a student = have no money for backup devices. Plus I'm still really > > pissed off that I bought a 10gig 7200 rpm seagate about 3 days before a big > > thread in here on how unreliable seagates are. Agh! > > > > Plus I have no IDE slots left so would have to buy a SCSI = very expensive. > > poo :-( > > well in this case you should split off your partitions, create > seperate / /tmp /usr /var and /home partitions. then backup /var (or > just /var/lib/dpkg) to /home/backup/ *usually* filesystem corruption > does not end up wrecking all your filesystems at the same time, so if > only /var gets trashed (in this case) you still have a backup in > /home/backup. > > if the disk dies your screwed, but this method protects you from > filesystem corruption fairly well.
Well yes: currently I use eight partitions, including one /misc which I can use for backups of non-really-big stuff: [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ df Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/hdb8 1542156 326000 1216156 22% / /dev/hdb5 15522 2674 12047 19% /boot /dev/hdb7 1028092 110340 917752 11% /misc /dev/hdb9 4883556 1128692 3754864 24% /usr /dev/hdd5 101485 29 96216 1% /tmp /dev/hdd6 512012 116200 395812 23% /root /dev/hdd7 717636 486296 231340 68% /var /dev/hdd8 1552236 993120 559116 64% /home When /var went down, I was able to tar and bzip2 up /home /etc /root and drop them into a windows partition which meant that I lost no real work - only work done on setting up debian was lost - no school work or such like. Unfortunately, I did have to let go to my mp3 collection: bzip2 couldn't handle a tar file that big....! But yes, I suppose the only precaution I can take is to back up the very important stuff to /misc. I guess I really should write a script to do that and then fire it off from cron every couple of days.... Any ideas about an effective scipt to do this? Any recommended programs? Matthew PS: One other advantage of partitioning this heavily is that when I was writing some web perl scripts a couple of months ago and made a recursive error, /var rapidly filled as apache got screwed with firing out error messages. But the machine didn't crash: I suspect things would have got a lot nastier if I hadn't got /var on a seperate partition. -- Matthew Sackman Nottingham, ENGLAND Using Debian/GNU Linux Enjoying computing