[ltp] Backup Solutions?

[Mike Taylor]

> Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2002 00:13:45 -0400
> From: "D. Sen" <dsen@ieee.org>
> 
> I am looking for suggestions for backing up my hard drive.
> 
> With hard-drives sizes greater than 30 Gigs, copying filesystems to
> CDROM is no longer an option.....Are people using USB(2.0?)/Firewire
> drives? Do they work reliably on linux?

You may consider this to be answering the question, and you may not,
but here's what I do.  I don't bother backing up the whole disk at
all, since most of what's there is either from the O/S CD or somewhere
similarly recoverable.  The stuff I'm actually _working_ on, I keep in
a CVS repository on a friendly server on the internet.  Then all I do
for backups is regularly commit my changes via Boring Old Modem.

> I guess my priorities for backing up the laptop are:
> 
>      1) Reliability
>      2) Speed
>      3) Mobility (so I can back up while I am travelling)

Well, it's been completely reliable so far.  It's fast, even given the
slowness of modem speeds, for the files I'm working with (source code,
mostly) though YMMV is you spend a lot of time GIMPing on 30MB
bitmaps.  And it's great for mobility too -- all I need is the cable
to connect the internal modem to a convenient phone socket.

So you may like to consider this approach instead of brute-forcing it
in hardware.  HTH.

 _/|_	 _______________________________________________________________
/o ) \/  Mike Taylor   <mike@miketaylor.org.uk>   www.miketaylor.org.uk
)_v__/\  "Value Exchange as the predominant business model in the
	 Information Age, is based on the concept of exchanging
	 profit generating value with your customers and prospects,
	 put differently it basically conceptualises the process of
	 making customer intimacy the thrust of your business model"
	 -- Executive Management (incorporating Executive Strategy
	 for Corporate Leaders) magazine, Spring 1996.
		^
		|
		|
	Well now, isn't that good to know?


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