[GTALUG] What Not To Backup

[Alvin Starr]

On 12/23/2016 02:21 PM, William Park via talk wrote:
> My recommendations...
>
> 1.  Backup entire disk to another disk, verbatim.  That is,
> 	dd if=/dev/sdX of=/dev/sdY bs=10M
>
>      First, you don't have to waste time figuring out what to back up.
>      Second, if disk fails, you can just swap the disks, and copy over
>      only the new files since last dd.
Generally this is a bad idea if your copying a live file system because 
you end up with a disk image that is corrupted to some extent.

>
> 2.  Backup entire /home to another disk.  That is,
> 	mount /home/sdZ /mnt/home
> 	rsync -aHxv -SAX /home/ /mnt/home/ --delete --exclude='/*/.gvfs'
>
>      Again, I would copy the whole things.  If you have somethings that
>      you don't want to backup, then you can put them in
>      /home/dont_backup, and add it to exclude list,
> 	--exclude='/dont_backup'
If your keeping rsync backups make sure you have some way to rotate the 
backups so you have more than just 1.
A single backup only works when the oops/problem... happened since the 
last backup and you catch it before the next backup.

> 	
> 3.  If your /home is on BTRFS filesystem, you can take snapshots, like
> 	btrfs subvolume snapshot -r home home--$(date +%F)
>
>      Harddisk is "cheap", and snapshot is "cheaper".
LVM snapshots are also handy.
It will be nice when btrfs becomes the linux default file system because 
the snapshot feature is just so damn handy.

-- 
Alvin Starr                   ||   voice: (905)513-7688
Netvel Inc.                   ||   Cell:  (416)806-0133
alvin at netvel.net              ||

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