Backing Up is Hard to Do?

Joe Barr writes "NewsForge is running a story this morning on a personal hardware/software backup solution for your Linux desktop (NewsForge is owned by Slashdot's parent OSTG). The solution doesn't require a SCSI controller, or tape drive, or the ability to grok a scripting language or archiving tool to work, either. It's based on point-and-click free software. Plus it includes a dead-parrot joke by Linus Torvalds."

Comments

So is a boot to the head

[Just Some Guy]

That's not a backup - that's a userland implementation of RAID 1 with very high latency.

I make daily differential backups (via AMANDA) to a rotating set of 12 tapes. If I accidentally delete /etc/shadow or some other important file, I have nearly two weeks to discover the problem and restore a previous version from tape. Your idea gives you, oh, until about the time that rsync discovers the missing file and dutifully nukes it from your "backup" drive.

What you're doing is certainly better than nothing, but it's not a backup solution by any definition of the term beyond "keeps zero or one copy of the file somewhere else".

Far, far better would be for your script to use dump or tar to create incremental backup files on your USB drive and to rotate them out on a regular basis.