On 9 May 2013 12:14, Gareth France <gareth.fra...@gmail.com> wrote: > ... > I don't have anything 500gb in size to do a full backup onto and I'm not > comfortable handing out my business' data at all.
You can use something like clonezilla to do the backup. This backs up only the used portion of the disc and also compresses it so that you will not need anything like 500GB (assuming you have not got vast amounts of data). I think you mentioned that you had a 40GB (or similar) disk that you had the data on in the first place, this should be plenty large enough for the clonezilla backup. It may be, however, that you only need to backup your home directory in which case you need even less space. You can then safely clear that out before sending the disk back. In fact I would recommend that you do both the above. Make sure that you can recover the data from your home directory backup before you clear it. You could also consider encrypting your home directory [1] in which case you can just leave the data there, unless you think it is so sensitive that someone would want to spend a very large amount of time trying to crack your password to extract the data. Back it up first however. Probably the cheapest way to get some additional backup space is to buy a disk from ebay along with an external USB caddy to put it in. You should be able to get something like a 350GB disk and a caddy for £25 or thereabouts. If you have an old desktop machine then even cheaper is to get just a disk off ebay and add that in to the desktop machine. I have to agree with others that have posted that you should in fact have multiple backups if the data is important. A disk can go up in smoke (metaphorically or literally) at any time, and the internet is full of requests for help from those who have had a single backup and discovered when they need it that the backup is not recoverable for some reason. Colin [1] http://www.howtogeek.com/116032/how-to-encrypt-your-home-folder-after-installing-ubuntu/ -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
