[TriLUG] Hard drive recovery

[Pat Regan]

Rick DeNatale wrote:
> As advised by the session which Jason and Jeremy did last year on backups I 
> do rsync based incremental backups on my workstation/server to a separate 
> physical hard drive. This gives me redundant copies of the current state of 
> my data, as well as historical backups. If one of my main drives fails I can 
> recover recent state (no longer than 4 hours ago) from the backup. And if I 
> oops I can go back four hours, yesterday, last week, two months ago etc.

I always see lots of people using rsync in various ways to do backup,
and it is a very good idea.  Have you ever looked at rdiff-backup:
http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/

I have been using it for about a year and a half now, and it is
wonderful.  Instead of storing whole copies of changed files, it stores
a binary diff of the changes.  It can be a little bit CPU intensive
though, since it has to diff any changed files.

I usually store about 1-2 months worth of twice per day differentials of
my 2 home machines, on a seperate drive.  At my usage levels that is
when they tend to grow to roughly 1.5x - 2x the size of the original.

I set up a friends machine running rdiff-backup to an extra hard drive
she had.  She currently has over 1 year of daily differentials stored
and it is using, if I remember correctly, about 25-30% more space than
the full backup.  So, obviously, YMMV :).

Pat
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