I decided to actually get backups going. I know, laugh. But I bet that when you snicker, you may also not have a great backup system in place.
Picked up a 160GB 2.5″ disk and an external casing. After careful calculation, it seems like maybe I could have saved money buying a pre-packaged solution. Weird.
Anyways, the tool of choice – rdiff-backup. Its simply dead easy to use. Just do: rdiff-backup <current> <backup-path>. My initial backup of about 56GB of my home directory, it took just under 2 hours for the first ever backup image.
Restore is something a lot of folk seem to forget. They make great backups, but never test restores. I went cold turkey – moved from Fedora to Ubuntu after a backup. It worked.
Only real problem is that in Fedora, I had uid/gid 500, but in Ubuntu, I was uid/gid 1000. That’s easily fixable, I restored (rdiff-backup -r), and I have my environment exactly as per before the format (and distribution switch).
I probably should try to do these backups daily, and maybe have even more that one drive for backups, but this is me being very appreciative of rdiff-backup. Today I ran it again after over a week.
time rdiff-backup /home/byte/ /media/disk/byte/ real 288m40.943s
user 52m1.951s
sys 12m57.641s
rdiff-backup also works over the network. Those dreamhost accounts are now starting to look very interesting for off-site storage. Read the documentation and examples if you’re wanting to get up to speed really quickly. Its also OS X compatible. Now if only I found a sensible Windows backup system…
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