Automate backups on Linux

[trickster]

If you use Linux, you already have access to extremely powerful tools for creating custom backup solutions. The solutions in this article can help you perform simple to more advanced and secure network backups using open source tools that are part of nearly every Linux distribution.

just wondering: what do you guys use for backup?

myself, i just copy my home partition to another partition on another harddrive like once every week or so...

[Schotty]

I actually do something similar. I rarely do much more than backup to CD/DVD important stuff (like game patches, roms, oggs, mpegs, etc). In the workforce I have a little script very similar to IBM's here.

[coltrane]

I have what I call a "install companion disk". I call em ICDs. Basically they have all of the requirements for a Linux/Windows install. Firefox, Thunderbird, Mail and Addressbook backups, Bookmarks, code for my webserver, and icons/theme sets. I really dont feel the need for scheduled backups, maybe a monthly MP3 dump, but thats about it.

[shebang]

I just have a script that selects certain folders to be backed up and compresses them in *.tar.bz2. So when you untar it you would get this / setting:

etc/ usr/ lib/ bin/ boot/ proc/ root/ home/ sbin/ tmp/ var/
Then when you cd to these dirs, what ever was backed up in those folders in the previous / partition are stored.

[Compunuts]

Should look into Amenda.

[lemaymd]

I created a Subversion (http://subversion.tigris.org) repository on an external harddisk and imported my entire home directory (minus Firefox cache!) into it. Then, when I want to do a backup, I just make sure I've added any newly-created files to the respository and execute "svn commit". Very efficient, origanized, and painless!

[chessforce]

[quote author=lemaymd link=board=19;threadid=9493;start=0#msg89705 date=1098021247]
I created a Subversion (http://subversion.tigris.org) repository on an external harddisk and imported my entire home directory (minus Firefox cache!) into it. Then, when I want to do a backup, I just make sure I've added any newly-created files to the respository and execute "svn commit". Very efficient, origanized, and painless!
[/quote]

Thanks for the tip! Karma++

[countach44]

I wrote a bash script to compress certain folders, move the archives to a second harddisk and write them to a zipdisk (I have those from when they were cool).

[Killer_Penguin]

[quote author=Ralinx link=board=19;threadid=9493;start=0#msg86240 date=1089564313]
just wondering: what do you guys use for backup?

myself, i just copy my home partition to another partition on another harddrive like once every week or so...
[/quote]

At home I burn important stuff to DVD+RW. At work I use Bacula. Very very cool software.