What backup method(s) do you use?

[Paul Howarth]

On Tue, 2006-04-18 at 03:06 -0500, Arthur Pemberton wrote:
> I would like to know what backup methods do you use for your data. So
> far, I am aware of:
> 
> - cp/scp
> - rync
> - rdiff-backup
> - archiving and relocating (tar, gz, bzip2, zip)
> 
> Thanks for your input.

I use bacula. I do a full backup around once every three months. I have
scheduled backups of my Linux and Windows clients four times every week,
incrementals during the week and a differential at the weekend. The
backup data is sent to a server with a DVD writer, where it is
compressed and written to hard disk in chunks of 585MB. When eight of
these chunks have been created (enough to fill a DVD), I manually write
them to DVD-R media and remove old backup chunk files (those superseded
by more recent files). Having the backup data on hard disk makes
recovery very fast (e.g. for accidentally deleted files), and in the
event of the DVD-writer server's hard disk dying, I can recover
everything up to the point at which I last wrote a DVD (usually about a
week previously). This I feel is fine for my home network but obviously
I would do it slightly differently for work data where recent work would
have to be committed to backup media more frequently.

Paul.