On Mon, 2009-03-30 at 18:24 -0700, daniel sobey wrote: > When thinking about backups you need to ask yourself what you are protecting > against. > > Do you want to protect yourself against a hard drive failure? > Though not a backup raid mirroring can help reduce the effects of this. > you could do a copy of all the data on one disk to another disk in the same > machine. > > do you want to protect against theft or fire? > You can rsync your files to a remote machine. > you can backup to a tape or an external hard drive and leave a copy at home, > at your parents house etc. > > do you have databases? > you will need to run a database tool to create a backup or do an export of > the tables first. an os copy of the data files would not work as the > database may be writing the file during the copy and you would get an > inconsistent copy. > > do you need protection against file corruption? > some backup methods only keep one version of the file, if you make a mistake > and create a bad version of the file you may not have a copy to go back to so > make multiple backups or use a system that supports versioning. > > how frequent do you need to back up? what type of machine is it? > I would probably have 2 types of backups, a full system backup and a backup > of some of the things that frequently changes. > The full backup would just start on your / and move forward. some advanced > systems will do a lvm snapshot to ensure you get a consistant backup from the > time the snapshot was taken. I would do this atleast once a week, maybe daily > maybe once a month it depends on your needs. > > For the daily frequent backup i would backup just the important information > to you. It may just be your home directory for your pc maybe your /etc as > well. if you run a web server bakup your /var/www, if you have a database, do > an export and backup the backup files. > > I have a vm at work, i do a daily tar backup of my /home and a weekly tar on > my /. > if you are working on a project a versioning system would be a good idea to > keep track of changes and allow you to go back to a previous change. > > > here is my script: > #!/bin/bash > BACKUPDIR=/media/cifs/dns/backups > BACKUPFILE=$BACKUPDIR/ubuntu-full-`date +%Y%m%d`.tar.gz > LOGFILE=$BACKUPDIR/ubuntu-full-`date +%Y%m%d`.log > BACKUP_RETENTION=+14 > > dpkg --get-selections >/home/dns/installed-packages > > echo "beginning backup at `date`" >$LOGFILE > tar --exclude=media/* --exclude=proc/* --exclude=storage/* --exclude=dev/* > --exclude=sys/ --exclude=lost+found/* --exclude=mnt/* -czvf $BACKUPFILE / > >> $LOGFILE 2> /dev/null > echo "finished backup at `date`" >> $LOGFILE > > >
Thank you Daniel, I will quietly work my way through logic and decide, indeed, what it is I ultimately want to accomplish. Script frightens me a little but, I guess I will have to quietly (again) go through it to understand what the commands are doing - before I copy it. I appreciate the fulsome help and advice you have provided. I'll let you know how I go in the end. Regards Dave -- ubuntu-au mailing list ubuntu-au@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-au
