Filesystem format for external hard disk

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Wed, 2012-06-06 at 16:58 +0100, Paul Smith wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 3:05 PM, Roberto Ragusa <mail at robertoragusa.it> wrote:
> >>> Are you planning to rsync, twice, once to each drive, or are you looking
> >>> to establish a software raid 1 between two attached usb drives?
> >>
> >> Thanks, Jeff. I am planning to rsync twice, once to each drive.
> >
> > Good idea. Sync them in different times; e.g. the first one every day and
> > the other one every week. In this way you have an older backup if you want
> > to restore something deleted by mistake.
> > And keep the "weekly" one in a different (more secure) place. ;-)
> >
> > As you use rsync, you may be interested in
> >
> > rsync -av --delete /home/psmith/ --link-dest /media/IOmega/backups/myhome/20120605 /media/IOmega/backups/myhome/20120606
> >
> > You can easily have 60 backups taken each day of the last two months and
> > restore whatever you have deleted or messed up (e.g. diff on what the file is and
> > what the file was).
> >
> > That is the setup I'm using (with dmcrypt, so to not have to worry about
> > a stolen backup disk).
> 
> Thanks, Roberto, for your helpful advice and suggestions!
> 
> Paul

See also rsnapshot, a set of wrappers around rsync which makes it a bit
easier to schedule backups, rotate daily, weekly, monthly etc.

poc