Gary Dale grabbed a keyboard and wrote: > > Bacula. It backs up whatever you want it to however you want it to. > > It's not as simple as some, but if you want a comprehensive backup > solution, it's hard to beat. Bacula has some pretty good job definitions > set up by default to do, for example, a weekly full backup and nightly > incrementals with backups going back as far as you want. > > I use it to back up home directories and some shared Windows files kept > on another machine. Bacula works well in mixed environments.
Sounds promising! I'll look into it. I've been a *NIX junkie since before Linux existed; config files don't scare me easily. :-) > On the other hand, to do a full system backup to a second drive, try dd. > Something as simple as a cron job to do > dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=1M > will do the copy quickly and effectively. I'm sure it does, but I'm not looking to just copy over the entire system to another drive every day. > However, you may also want to consider software raid (mdadm). Use your > two drives in a RAID 1 array so that a single drive failure won't shut > you down. Use this in conjunction with bacula to avoid the "why did I rm > that" problem and you should be unstoppable. Agreed. Unfortunately I've been out of work for a while now, so purchasing *two* drives is kinda out of the question. At least for now. So if I do scratch up enough money to get another 1T hard drive, I'll use it for backups. But soon as I'm working again, a RAID mirror is definitely something I'd want to set up, for just the reason you mention. > RAID 1 also leads to faster reads. Really? I thought that the stripped array would get you faster access than simple mirroring. Guess I learned something new. :-) --Dave
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